MR FREEMAN AND THE BATTLE OF HASTINGS
Ὅταν ὁ ἰσχυρὸς καθωπλισμένος φυλάσσῃ τὴν ἑαυτοῦ αὐλήν, ἐν εἰρἑνῃ ἐστὶν τὰ ὑπάρχοντα αὐτοῦ. ἐπὰν δε ἰσχυρότερος αὐτοῦ ἐπελθὼν νικήσῃ αὐτόν, τὴν πανοπλίαν αὐτοῦ αἴρει ἐφ᾽ ᾗ ἐπεποίθει.
It might well be thought the height of rashness to attempt criticism, even in detail, of Mr Freeman's narrative of the Battle of Hastings. For its story, as his champion has well observed, is 'the centre and the very heart of Mr Freeman's work; if he could blunder here in the most carefully elaborated passage of his whole history he could blunder anywhere; his reputation for accuracy would be gone almost beyond hope of retrieving it'.[1] And indeed, it may fairly be described as Mr Freeman's greatest achievement, the point where he is strongest of all. He himself described the scene as the 'battle which is the centre of my whole history', and reminded us that
on its historic importance I need not dwell; it is the very subject of my history.... Looking also at the fight simply as a battle, it is one of the most memorable in all military history.
That is the first point. The second is that in his battle pieces our author was always at his best. Essentially a concrete historian, objective as Macaulay in his treatment, he loved incident and action; loved them, indeed, so well, that he could scarcely bring himself to omit the smallest details of a skirmish:
E ripenso le mobili
Tende, e i percossi valli,
E 'l campo dei manipoli,
E l'onda dei cavalli.
Precentor Venables has well described
that wonderful discourse, one of his greatest triumphs—in which, with flashing eye and thrilling voice, he made the great fight of Senlac—as he loved to call it, discarding the later name—which changed the fortunes of England and made her what she is, live and move before his hearers.
My third point is that his knowledge of the subject was unrivalled. He had visited the battlefield, he tells us, no less than five times, accompanied by the best experts, civil and military, he could find; he had studied every authority, and read all that had been written, till he was absolutely master of every source of information. He had further executed for him, by officers of the Royal Engineers, an elaborate plan of the battle based on his unwearied studies. Never was historian more splendidly equipped.
Thus was prepared that 'very lucid and quite original account of the battle', as Mr G. T. Clark describes it, which we are about to examine; that 'detailed account of the battle' that Mr Hunt, in his Norman Britain, describes as written 'with a rare combination of critical exactness and epic grandeur'.
THE NAME OF 'SENLAC'
Before we approach the great battle, it is necessary to speak plainly of the name which Mr Freeman gave it, the excruciating name of 'Senlac'. It is necessary, because we have here a perfect type of those changes in nomenclature on which Mr Freeman insisted, and which always remind one of Macaulay's words:
Mr Mitford piques himself on spelling better than any of his neighbours; and this not only in ancient names, which he mangles in defiance both of custom and of reason.... In such cases established usage is considered as law by all writers except Mr Mitford ... but he proceeds on no principle but that of being unlike the rest of the world. Every child has heard of Linnæus; therefore Mr Mitford calls him Linné. Rousseau is known all over Europe as Jean Jacques; therefore Mr Mitford bestows on him the strange appellation of John James.
None of Mr Freeman's peculiar 'notes' is more familiar than this tendency, and none has given rise to bitterer controversy or more popular amusement. 'Pedantry' was the charge brought against him, and to this charge he was as keenly sensitive as was Browning to that of 'obscurity'. Of both writers it may fairly be said that they evaded rather than met the charge brought against them. The Regius Professor invariably maintained that accuracy, not 'pedantry', was his true offence. Writing, in the Fortnightly Review, on 'The Study of History', he set forth his standing defence in these words:
I would say, as the first precept, Dare to be accurate. You will be called a pedant for doing so, but dare to be accurate all the same.
He who shall venture to distinguish between two English boroughs, between two Hadriatic islands when the authorized caterer for the public information thinks good to confound them, must be content to bear the terrible name of pedant, even if no worse fate still is in store for him.
Was, then, our author a mere pedant, or was this the name that ignorance bestowed on knowledge? For an answer to this question, 'Senlac' is a test-case. 'Every child', in Macaulay's words, had heard of the Battle of Hastings; it was known by that name 'all over Europe' from time immemorial. Unless, therefore, that name was wrong, it was wanton and mischievous to change it; and, even if changed, it was indefensible to substitute the name of Senlac, unless there is proof that the battle was so styled when it was fought.
As to the first of these points, the old name was in no sense wrong. Precisely as the battle of Poitiers was fought some miles from Poitiers, so was it with that of Hastings. Yet we all speak of the Battle of Poitiers, although we might substitute the name of Maupertuis more legitimately than that of Senlac. The only plea that Mr Freeman could advance was that people were led by the old name to imagine that the battle was fought at Hastings itself! Of those who argue in this spirit, it was finely said by the late Mr Kerslake that
instead of lifting ignorance to competence by teaching what ought to be known, they cut down what ought to be known to the capacity of those who are deficient of that knowledge. Instead of making them understand the meaning of the ancient and established word 'Anglo-Saxon', they disturb the whole world of learning with an almost violent attempt to turn out of use the established word, which has been thoroughly understood for ages.
The simple answer to Mr Freeman's contention is, that it is needless to make the change in histories, because those who read them learn that the fight was at Battle; while as to those who do not read histories, it is obvious that such a name as 'Senlac' will in no way lighten their darkness.
The change, therefore, was uncalled for. But it was not merely uncalled for; it was also absolutely wrong. 'To the battle itself,' Mr Freeman wrote, 'I restore its true ancient name of Senlac.' In so doing the writer acted in the spirit of those who 'restore' our churches and who gave that word so evil a sound in the ears of all archæologists, Mr Freeman himself included. I am reminded of the protest of the Society of Antiquaries on hearing 'with much regret that a fifteenth-century pinnacle' at Rochester Cathedral 'is in danger of destruction in order that a modern pinnacle, professing to represent that which stood in the place in the twelfth century, may be set up in its stead'. Precisely such a 'restoration' is Mr Freeman's 'Senlac'. Professing to represent the ancient name of the battle, it is substituted for that name which the battle has borne from the days of the Conqueror to our own. In William of Malmesbury as in Domesday Book we read of 'the Battle of Hastings' (Bellum Hastingense), and all Mr Freeman's efforts failed admittedly to discover any record or any writer who spoke of the Battle of Senlac (Bellum Senlacium) save Orderic alone. Now Orderic wrote two generations after the battle was fought; the name he strove to give it fell from his pen stillborn; and the fact that this name was a fad of his own is shown by what Mr Freeman suppressed, namely, that Orderic, in the same breath, tells us that Battle Abbey was founded as 'cœnobium Sanctæ Trinitatis Senlac', whereas we learn from Mr Freeman himself that
the usual title is 'ecclesia Sancti Martini de Bello', 'ecclesia de Bello', or, as we have seen, in English 'þæt mynster æt þære Bataille'. The fuller form, 'Abbas Sancti Martini de loco Belli', appears in Domesday, 11b: but it is commonly called in the Survey 'ecclesia de Labatailge'.
So much for Orderic's authority.
So violent an innovation as this of our author's could not pass unchallenged. Mr Frederic Harrison threw down the gauntlet (Contemporary Review, January 1886), attacking, in a brilliant and incisive article, Mr Freeman's 'pedantry' along the whole line. But he chiefly complained of
a far more serious change of name that the 'Old English' school have introduced; which, if it were indefinitely extended, would wantonly confuse historical literature. I mean the attempt to alter names which are the accepted landmarks of history. It is now thought scholarly to write of 'the Battle of Senlac' instead of 'the Battle of Hastings'. As every one knows, the fight took place on the site of Battle Abbey, seven miles from Hastings; as so many great battles, those of Tours, Blenheim, Cannæ, Chalons, and the like, have been named from places not the actual spot of the combat.
But since for 800 years the historians of Europe have spoken of 'the Battle of Hastings', it does seem a little pedantic to rename it.... The sole authority for 'Battle of Senlac' is Orderic, a monk who lived and wrote in Normandy in the next century. Yet, on the strength of this secondary authority, the 'Old English' school choose to erase from English literature one of our most familiar names.
Mr Freeman's rejoinder must be noticed, because singularly characteristic. Treating Mr Harrison 'de haut en bas', he expressed surprise that his friends should expect him to reply to an article which had merely amused him, and—unable, of course, to adduce any fresh authority for 'Senlac'—denounced his critic for a 'reckless raid into regions where he does not know the road'. For this charge there was no foundation in the matter of which we treat. Mr Freeman persisted that he had given the battle 'the only name that I found for it anywhere' (which we have seen was not the case), and sarcastically observed that 'so to do is certainly "pedantic", for it conduces to accuracy'.
The truth is simply that the site of the battle had no name at all. As the professor himself wrote:
The spot was then quite unoccupied and untilled; nothing in any of the narratives implies the existence of any village or settlement; our own Chronicle only describes the site as by 'the hoar apple-tree' ('He com him togenes æt þære haran apuldran').
Consequently, when men wished to speak of the great conflict, they were driven, as in similar cases, to term it the Battle of Hastings, or, if they wished to be more exact, they had to describe it, by periphrasis, as fought on 'the site which is now called Battle'.
Henry of Huntingdon, our author tells us, is guilty, though otherwise well informed, of 'a statement so grotesquely inaccurate as that Harold "aciem suam construxit in planis Hastinges"'. Why 'grotesque'? It would be strictly accurate to describe a battle, even seven miles from Salisbury, as fought on Salisbury Plain; while, as to the word 'plain', his horror of field-sports may have caused Mr Freeman's ignorance of the fact that another such stretch of Sussex Down is known as 'Plumpton Plain'.[2] But the fact is that the whole difficulty arose from that singular narrowness that cramped our author's mind, and that lies at the root, when rightly understood, of his most distinctive tenets. For he was a pedant, after all. And, observe, this 'pedantry' did, in practice, conduce not to true accuracy, but to the very reverse. Paradoxical though this may sound, it is literally true. Let us take a striking instance. In his account of the attack on Dover in 1067, Mr Freeman argued, 'from the distinct mention of oppidum and oppidani in Orderic', that it was not the castle, as supposed, but the town that was attacked. And so convinced was he of this, that he forced his authorities into harmony with his view against their plain meaning. This was because he was not aware that Orderic—'my dear old friend Orderic', as in one place he terms him—was in the habit of using oppidum for castle. He must have afterwards discovered this; for his theory was tacitly and significantly dropped, and the old version substituted, in a subsequent edition. Again, an article on 'City and Borough', which he contributed to Macmillan's Magazine, was based on the fundamental assumption that civitas, in the Norman period, must have had a specialized denotation. The fact that, on the contrary, the same town is spoken of as a civitas and as a burgus, cuts the ground from under this assumption, and, with it, destroys the whole of its elaborate superstructure. Our author's method, in short, placed him in standing conflict with every authority for his period. Never was 'the sacredness of words' treated as of less account; never, indeed, were words more wantonly changed. What would Mr Freeman have said had he known that the compilers of that sacrosanct record, Domesday Book itself, revelled in altering the wording of the sworn original returns? Such was the spirit of the men whose language he strove to limit by a terminology as precise as that of modern philosophy.
I may have wandered somewhat from 'Senlac', but my object was to show that Mr Freeman misunderstood twelfth-century writers by assigning to them his own peculiarities. It did not in any way follow from their speaking of a 'Battle of Hastings' that they 'grotesquely' supposed it to have been fought at the town itself: they allowed themselves an elasticity, both in word and phrase, which was so alien to himself that he could not realize its existence, and therefore accused them of ignorance because their language was different from his. In the same spirit he would never admit that the 'Castellum Warham' of Domesday Book was no other than Corfe Castle, although, as Mr Eyton and Mr Bond have shown, the fact is certain.
But the crux is yet to come. To any one acquainted with 'Old English' it must instantly occur that 'Senlac' is not an English name. Mr Freeman glided over this by simply ignoring the difficulty, but was he aware that the name in question, as 'Senlecque' (or 'Senlecques'), is actually found—in France? One is reminded of his own criticism on the name 'Duncombe Park':
When the lands of Helmsley were made to take the name of Duncombe, a real wrong was done to geography.... How came a combe in Yorkshire? The thing is a fraud on nomenclature as great as any of the frauds which the first Duncombe, 'born to carry parcels and to sweep down a counting-house', contrived to commit on the treasury of the nation.
How came a French 'Senlac' in 'Old English' Sussex? The name is as obviously foreign as 'Senlis' itself, and the occurrence, in later days of 'Santlachæ' as a local field-name, cannot avail against this fact, or prove that this open down, in days before the Conquest, could have borne such a title. Therefore, when Mr Freeman wrote that the English king 'pitched his camp upon the ever memorable heights of Senlac', he was guilty, not only of anachronism, but of a 'real wrong to geography', and, in the name of accuracy, he introduced error.[3]
I have gone thus carefully into this matter because the name has been meekly adopted by historians, and even by journalists, thereby proving the power of that tendency to fashion and imitation on which, in his Physics and Politics, Mr Bagehot loved to insist. For my part I make an earnest appeal to all who may write or teach history to adhere to the 'true ancient name' of the Battle of Hastings, and to reject henceforward an innovation which was uncalled for, misleading, and wrong.[4]
THE PALISADE
The distinctive peculiarity of the English tactics, we learn from Mr Freeman at the outset, is found in an entirely novel device introduced on this occasion by Harold. Instead of merely forming his troops in the immemorial array known as the shield-wall, he turned 'the battle as far as possible into the likeness of a siege',[5] by building around them a 'palisade' of solid timber. How large a part this 'palisade' plays in Mr Freeman's story may be gathered from the fact that it is mentioned at least a score of times in his account of the great battle. This 'fortress of timber', with its 'wooden walls', had 'a triple gate of entrance', and was composed of 'firm barricades of ash and other timber, wattled in so close together that not a crevice could be seen'.
It would be easier for me to deal with this 'palisade' if one could form a clear idea of what it represented to Mr Freeman's mind. Judging from the passages quoted above, and from his praising Henry of Huntingdon for his 'admirable comparison of Harold's camp to a castle';[6] I was led to believe that he imagined precisely such a timber wall as crowned in those days a castle mound. Such a defence is well shown in the Bayeux Tapestry, crowning the castle mound which William threw up at Hastings. Now, this very parallel is suggested by Mr Freeman himself. Describing Harold's position as 'not without reason called a fortress' [where?] he suggested that 'its defences might be nearly equal to those of William's own camp at Hastings' (p. 447). Following up this parallel, we find Mr Freeman writing of this latter:
A portion of English ground was already entrenched and palisaded, and changed into a Norman fortress (p. 418).... He saw the carpenters come out with their axes; he saw the fosse dug, and the palisade thrown up (p. 419). They had already built a fort and had fenced it in with a palisade (p. 420).
Without binding Mr Freeman down to a defence precisely of this character—and, indeed, in this as in other matters, he may not even himself have formed a clear idea of what he meant—it gives us, I think we may fairly say, a general idea of his 'palisade'. It was certainly no mere row of stakes,[7] no heap of cottage window frames,[8] no fantastic array of shields tied to sticks,[9] no 'abattis of some sort'[10] that Mr Freeman had in view, whatever his champions may pretend. As for the defenders of the 'palisade', they cannot even agree among themselves as to what it really was. Mr Archer produces a new explanation, only to throw it over almost as soon as it is produced.[11] One seeks to know for certain what one is expected to deal with; but, so far as it is possible to learn, nobody can tell one. There is only a succession of dissolving views, and one is left to deal with a nebulous hypothesis.[12]
Mr Freeman wrote of his 'palisade' as a mere 'development of the usual tactics of the shield-wall'; but this is an obvious misconception. It might, indeed, be used as a substitute for the 'shield-wall', and would enable the troops behind it to adopt a looser formation; but to suppose that they were ranged 'closely together in the thick array of the shield-wall', with this second wall in front of them, is surely absurd. Till the 'wooden walls' were broken the 'shield-wall' was needless. To retain the disadvantages of its close order, when that order had been rendered needless, would have been simply insane. Yet this insanity, in our author's eyes, was 'the master-skill of Harold'. Was there time, moreover, to construct such a fortress, if 'the battle followed almost immediately', as we learn, 'on the arrival of Harold'? Lastly, would there be material on the spot for a palisade (see ground plan) about a mile in length?[13] These awkward points may not have occurred to Mr Freeman; but to others they will, I think, cause some uneasiness. Let us then examine Mr Freeman's authorities for the existence of this palisade.
MR FREEMAN'S AUTHORITIES FOR IT
In his note on 'The Details of the Battle of Senlac' (iii. 756), Mr Freeman explained that he had given the authorities on which his statements rested, adding:
Each reader can therefore judge for himself how far my narrative is borne out by my authorities.
Loyally keeping to this principle, I propose to test his statements by the authorities he gives for them himself. I therefore address myself to the passages in Henry of Huntingdon and in Wace.
(1) Henry of Huntingdon
The passage relied on by the historian is this:
Quum ergo Haroldus totam gentem suam in una acie strictissime locasset et quasi castellum inde construxisset[14] impenetrabiles erant Normannis (iii. 444, note).
Mr Freeman thus paraphrased Henry's words:
He occupied and fortified, as thoroughly as the time and the means at his command would allow, a post of great natural strength, which he made into what is distinctly spoken of as a castle (Ibid.).[15]
Although the writer made it his complaint against one of the editors in the Rolls series that he could not 'construe his Latin', we see that the same failing led him here himself into error. Inde refers, and can only refer, to Harold's troops themselves. A fortress Harold wrought; but he wrought it of flesh and blood: it was behind no ramparts that the soldiers of England awaited the onset of the chivalry of France.
The metaphor, of course, is a common one. Henry of Huntingdon himself recurs to it, when describing that 'acies', at the Battle of Lincoln, which Stephen 'circa se ... strictissime collocavit' (p. 271), as Harold, he wrote, 'gentem suam in una acie strictissime locasset' (p. 203). For he shows us Stephen's 'acies' assailed 'sicut castellum'.[16] In the same spirit an Irish bard tells us how his countrymen, on the battlefield of Dysert O'Dea (May 10, 1318), closed in their ranks, 'like a strong fortress', as their enemies surged around them. It was felicitous, indeed, to describe as 'quasi castellum' that immovable mass of warriors girt by their shield-wall,[17] that 'fortress of shields', as Mr Freeman termed it, at Hastings itself (iii. 492), at Stamford Bridge (iii. 372), at Maldon (i. 272), and even in earlier days (i. 151).
It was Mr Freeman's initial error in thus materializing a metaphor (through misconstruing his Latin) that first led me to doubt the existence of the 'palisade'. His champion, Mr Archer, in his first article,[18] was ominously silent as to this error: in the second, he had to confess of this passage, the first of Mr Freeman's proofs, that he himself 'should never think of using it to prove a palisade'.[19] Exit, therefore, Henry of Huntingdon.
(2) Wace
Two passages, and two alone, are in question—
(A) ll. 6991-4, which Mr Freeman has paraphrased thus:
| Wace | Mr Freeman |
|---|---|
| Heraut a le lieu esgarde, Closre le fist de boen fosse, De treis parz laissa treis entrees Qu'il a garder a commandees. | He occupied the hill; he surrounded it on all its accessible sides by a palisade, with a triple gate of entrance, and defended it to the south by an artificial ditch (iii. 447). |
My criticism on this has been from the first that Wace here speaks only of a ditch, and that Mr Freeman has not only introduced here the alleged palisade, from which Wace's 'fosse' was quite distinct, but has also transferred to that palisade the 'treis entrees' of the fosse. That Mr Freeman did treat the 'palisade' and the 'fosse' as distinct and considerably apart is proved by this passage:
The Normans had crossed the [sic] English fosse, and were now at the foot of the hill with the palisades and the axes right before them (iii. 476).
The 'fosse' is that 'artificial ditch' of which Mr Freeman speaks in the above passage, the only one of which he does speak. Therefore, that 'artificial ditch' was, in his view, down in the valley to the south, and had nothing to do with that 'palisade' which he placed on the hill. There is thus no possible doubt as to Mr Freeman's view. On his own showing, the above lines make no mention of a palisade on the hill.[20]
(B) ll. 7815-26: The passage in question runs thus:
Fet orent devant els escuz
De fenestres è d'altres fuz,
Devant els les orent levez,
Come cleies joinz è serrez;
Fait en orent devant closture,
N'i laissierent nule jointure,
Par onc Normant entr'els venist
Qui desconfire les volsist.
D'escuz e d'ais s'avironoent,
Issi deffendre se quidoent
Et s'il se fussent bien tenu,
Ia ne fussent le ior vencu.
In his first edition, writing, I believe, under the influence of Taylor's version, Mr Freeman gave these lines in a footnote to his narrative of the battle, and appears to have then looked on them as describing his palisade.[21] But in his 'second edition, revised', in preparing which he went 'minutely through every line, and corrected or improved whatever seemed to need correction or improvement' (p. v), he transferred these lines to his appendix on the battle, where he wrote concerning them as follows:
[(At Maldon) the English stood, as at Senlac, in the array common to them and their enemies—a strong line, or rather wedge, of infantry, forming a wall with their shields (i. 271).][22]
Of the array of the shield-wall we have often heard already, as at Maldon (see vol. i. p. 271), but it is at Senlac that we get the fullest descriptions of it [sic] all the better for coming in the mouths of enemies. Wace gives his description, 12941:
'Fet orent devant els escuz
De fenestres è d'altres fuz;
Devant els les orent levez.
. . . . .
Et s'il se fussent bien tenu
Ja ne fussent li jor vencu.'
So William of Malmesbury, 241. 'Pedites omnes cum bipennibus, conserta ante se scutorum testudine, impenetrabilem cuneum faciunt; quod profecto illis eâ die saluti fuisset, nisi Normanni simulatâ fugâ more suo confertos manipulos laxassent.' So at the battle of the Standard, according to Æthelred of Rievaux (343), 'scutis scuta junguntur, lateribus latera conseruntur' (iii. 763-4).
The unquestionable meaning of Mr Freeman's words is that Wace's lines (like the other passages) describe the time-honoured shield-wall, 'the fortress of shields, so often sung of alike in English and in Scandinavian minstrelsy' (iii. 372).
Appealing to this, his own verdict, in my original article,[23] I spoke of these lines as referring to the 'shield-wall', and maintained that 'escuz' meant shields, not 'barricades'. This also, it will be seen, must have been Mr Freeman's view, when he pronounced these lines to be a description of the shield-wall. I therefore declared that the only evidence he adduced for his palisade had been demonstrably obtained by misconstruing his Latin, and (on his own showing) by mistranslating his French.
This has been my case from the first: it remains my case now.
Unlike our forefathers on the hill of battle, I will not be decoyed into breaking 'the line of the shield-wall'.[24]
MY ARGUMENT AGAINST IT
In order to show clearly that I adhere to my original position, I need only reprint my argument as it appeared in the Quarterly Review.
It is clear that if he (Mr Freeman) found it needful, in his story of the great battle, to mention this barricade about a score of times, it must have occupied a prominent place in every contemporary narrative. And yet we assert without fear of contradiction that (dismissing the 'Roman de Rou') in no chronicle or poem, among all Mr Freeman's authorities, could he find any ground for this singular delusion; while the Bayeux Tapestry itself, which he rightly places at their head, will be searched in vain for a palisade, or for anything faintly resembling it, from beginning to end of the battle.[25]
On this passage we take our stand: it is the very essence of our case. We made our statement 'without fear of contradiction'; and it is not contradicted. Moreover, we can now further strengthen it by appealing to Baudri's poem,[26] an authority of the first rank, in which, as in the others, there is no allusion to the existence of any 'palisade'.
It will be observed that, in this passage, we expressly excluded Wace's poem. We did so because—although, as we have seen, Mr Freeman failed to produce from it any proof of a palisade—we preferred to leave it an open question whether Wace did or did not believe the English to have fought behind a palisade. In rebutting Mr Freeman's evidence, that question did not arise.
There is another argument that we refrained from bringing forward because we thought it superfluous. The Normans, of course, as Mr Freeman reminds us, magnified the odds against them: 'Nothing but the special favour of God could have given his servants a victory over their enemies, which was truly miraculous' (p. 440). William of Poitiers, he adds (p. 479), sets forth their difficulties in detail:—
'Angli nimium adjuvantur superioris loci opportunitate, quem sine procursu tenent, et maxime conferti; atque ingenti quoque numerositate suâ atque validissimâ corpulentiâ; præterea pugnæ instrumentis, quæ facile per scuta vel alia tegmina viam inveniunt.'
Now William who was not only a contemporary writer, but, says Mr Freeman (p. 757), 'understood' the site, had, obviously, every inducement to include, among the difficulties of the Normans, that special 'development', which according to Mr Freeman (pp. 444, 468), 'the foresight of Harold' had introduced on this occasion, and which, he assures us, involved 'a frightful slaughter' of the Normans. And yet this writer is absolutely silent, both here and throughout the battle, as to the existence of a barricade of any sort or kind.[27]
Here I would briefly refer to certain misrepresentations. Mr Archer claimed, in his original article (Cont. Rev., 344) to 'mainly rely' upon Wace, on the ground that I did so myself. I was obliged to describe this statement at once as 'the exact converse of the truth'.[28] For it will be seen, I expressly excluded Wace from the authorities on whom I relied, and specially rested my case, from the first, on the evidence of the Bayeux Tapestry. It is much to be regretted that Mr Archer has deliberately repeated his statement,[29] though even his ally reluctantly admits that it was 'not very happily worded'.[30]
Mr Archer might well seek to avoid the Bayeux Tapestry, for its evidence is dead against him, and he cannot explain it away. His first attempt was a brief allusion, accepting its authority without question, but suggesting that it might represent that part of the line where the barricade was absent.[31] Of this suggestion I at once disposed by showing that it is 'not only absolutely without foundation, but is directly opposed to Mr Freeman's theory, and, indeed, to his express statements'.[32] Forced to drop this explanation, my opponent, in his next article, fell back on the desperate device of repudiating the authority of the Tapestry,[33] 'the most authentic record' of the battle according to the late Professor, who was never weary of insisting on its 'paramount importance'. On my showing, beyond the possibility of question, that this amounted to rejecting everything that Mr Freeman had written on the subject,[34] Mr Archer once more shifts his tactics, and now writes thus:
If any fact in Hastings is more certain than another, it is that at the beginning of the battle the main body of the English was posted on a hill. Now 'the priceless record'—the Bayeux Tapestry—represents them on a plain. If the Tapestry could leave out this central feature—the hill of Senlac—from its picture of the opening battle, still more easily could it leave out the intricate barriers upon the hill.[35]
This ad captandum argument is disposed of as easily as the others. The Tapestry does not concern itself with landscape, and shows us neither a hill nor a plain. It could not, on a narrow strip, show us 'the hill of Senlac', but it could—and would—show us the alleged palisade. For not only does it strive under every difficulty to represent such objects as churches, castles and houses, but it faithfully shows us the 'palisade'[36] raised by William at Hastings itself. And if it be urged that it could not depict men fighting behind such a defence, let us turn to the scene at Dinan. If we compare it with the opening scene of the great battle itself, we see precisely similar horsemen advancing to the attack, similar infantry resisting that attack, and similar spears flying between them. But at Dinan the defenders have a palisade, and on the hill of battle they have not.[37]
But although the evidence of the Bayeux Tapestry, Mr Freeman's own supreme authority, remains absolutely unshaken, it must not be supposed that I rely on that evidence alone. I attach as much importance as ever—and so will, I think, all prejudiced persons—to the other portion of my argument, that if there had been a barricade playing so important a part in the battle that Mr Freeman found it needful to mention it at least a score of times, it is practically inconceivable that all the authorities I enumerate should have absolutely ignored its existence. Judging from Mr Freeman's own experience, it would be simply impossible to describe the battle without mentioning the 'palisade'.
It is very significant that when we turn to a real feature of the English line, namely its close array, we find the above authorities as unanimous in mentioning the fact as they are in ignoring that 'curious defence',[38] those 'intricate barriers', as Mr Archer terms them, 'upon the hill'.[39]
The fight has raged so fiercely around this 'palisade' that I have been obliged to discuss it at somewhat disproportionate length. But to sum up, we have now seen, firstly, that the alleged palisade was a new 'development', and needs, as such, special proof of its existence; secondly, that of Mr Freeman's proofs, one at least must admittedly be abandoned, while he himself has impugned the other;[40] thirdly, that the evidence, both positive and presumptive, is altogether opposed to the existence of a palisade. In the narrative of the battle we shall find Mr Freeman interpolating the alleged defence solely from his own imagination, such references proving, on inquiry, to be imaginary and imaginary alone.[41]
THE SHIELD-WALL
It is a pleasure to find myself here in complete agreement with Mr Freeman. In his very latest study of the battle Mr Freeman wrote as follows:
The English clave to the old Teutonic tactics. They fought on foot in the close array of the shield-wall.[42]
Mr Archer says they cannot have done so.[43] There was also, according to Mr Freeman, a barricade, in front of—and distinct from—the shield-wall, being a special development which, he tells us, 'the foresight of Harold' had introduced on this occasion (pp. 444, 468). The barricade is denied by me, the shield-wall by Mr Archer. Whichever of us is right, Mr Freeman's accuracy is, in either case, equally impugned.
It is essential to remember that Mr Freeman, throughout, treated the palisade and the shield-wall as separate and distinct. Thus he wrote so late as 1880:
Besides the palisade the front ranks made a kind of inner defence with their shields, called the shield-wall. The Norman writers were specially struck with the close array of the English.[44]
So in his great work we read of 'the shield-wall and the triple palisade still unbroken' (iii. 467). Later still 'the shield-wall still stood behind the palisade' (p. 487). Even when 'the English palisade was gone the English shield-wall was still a formidable hindrance in the way of the assailants (p. 491). The array of the shield-wall was still kept, though now without the help of the barricades' (p. 491). Here we have the very phrase of note NN, 'the array of the shield-wall',[45] and it is shown beyond question that Mr Freeman's shield-wall, whatever Mr Archer may pretend, was quite distinct from the palisade, and was a shield-wall 'pure and simple'.
Let it also be clearly understood what Mr Freeman meant by that 'array of the shield-wall', of which the disputed passage in Wace was, he held, a description. He shows us the whole English army 'ranged so closely together in the thick array of the shield-wall, that while they only kept their ground the success of an assailant was hopeless'.[46] He describes them as, 'a strong line, or rather wedge, of infantry, forming a wall with their shields',[47] and he ascribes their defeat to their 'breaking the line of the shield-wall'.[48]
Of this shield-wall my opponent rashly wrote:
The Reviewer's [sic] theory of an extended shield-wall vanishes like smoke. If Wace is any authority ... the question is settled once and for all. There was no extended shield-wall at Hastings.[49]
Of course, 'the Reviewer's theory' here is no other than Mr Freeman's own.
If, in spite of the above evidence, it should still be pretended by anyone that the plain meaning of Mr Freeman's words is not their meaning, I will refer them not to my own interpretation, but to that of Mr Freeman's friend and colleague, the Rev W. Hunt, who wrote in the historian's lifetime, 'at his request' and by his 'invitation', and whose proofs were revised by Mr Freeman himself.[50] This is Mr Hunt's version:
Set in close array behind a palisade forming a kind of fortification, shoulder to shoulder and shield to shield, the army of Harold presented a steady and immovable front to the Norman attack ... Fatal was the national formation of the English battle, when men stood in the closest order, forming a wall with their shields. While no mode of array could be stronger so long as the line remained unbroken it made it hard to form the line again.[51]
So, again, in his life of Harold:
All the heavy-armed force fought in close order, shield touching shield, so as to present a complete wall to the enemy.[52]
Here we have no tortuous imaginings, but, in plain and straightforward words, 'what historians in general evidently mean' when they speak of a 'shield-wall', what it meant to Mr Freeman, what it means to Mr Hunt, and it is admitted, to myself.[53] Such was the English shield-wall, according to Mr Freeman, at 'Senlac'; it was what Mr Archer definitely declares it cannot possibly have been.
Lastly, as to the ground on which Mr Archer pronounces impossible a continuous shield-wall[54] —namely, that the English could not have fought in such close order,[55] and that the axe-men being 'shieldless ... could not have formed the shield-wall'; one need only confront him with Mr Freeman's words.
| Mr Freeman | Mr Archer |
|---|---|
| Referring to the mode of fighting of an English army in that age, and to 'the usual tactics of the shield-wall', Mr Freeman wrote of 'the close array of the battle-axe men' (p. 444). He had already written of 'the English house carls with their ... huge battle-axes', accustomed to fight in 'the close array to the shield-wall.'[56] 'They still formed their shield-wall and fought with their great axes.'[57] | It is enough for me that common sense, the tapestry, Wace,[58] our Italian chronicler, and his later Old French translator all show that the English axe-men could not or did not form the shield-wall (English Historical Review, ix. p. 14). Possibly they [the house carls] may have formed a genuine shield-wall; but while forming it they cannot have been using the 'bipennis', or the two-handed axe (Ibid., p. 20, note). |
I am compelled to repeat what I said in the Quarterly Review.
We almost hesitate to waste our own and our readers' time on a writer who, professing to vindicate Mr Freeman's view as against us, devotes his energies to proving that view to be utterly absurd.[59]
Nor will Mr Archer derive comfort from 'our only English "specialist" on mediaeval warfare';[60] who holds, as I had pointed out, that 'the English axemen' did fight 'arranged in a compact mass'.[61]
It is significant that the fact Mr Archer so confidently rejects is precisely that on which I am at one with Mr Freeman, Mr Hunt, and Mr Oman, and to which the original authorities bear witness with peculiar unanimity. Thus William of Poitiers, an authority of the first rank, describes the English as 'maxime conferti', speaks of their 'nimia densitas', and proceeds to dwell on the terrible effect of their weapon, the famous battle-axe. William of Malmesbury tells us that the axemen 'impenetrabilem cuneum faciunt'. Even Mr Archer's authority, Wace, writes of these warriors:
A pie furent serrement.
Baudri describes the English as 'consertos',[62] and the Brevis Relatio as 'spissum agmen'. Bishop Guy writes of the 'spissum nemus Angligenarum', and styles them 'densissima turba'; Henry of Huntingdon, we saw, tells us that they were arranged 'in una acie strictissime', and were thus 'impenetrabiles Normannis'.
No feature of the great battle is more absolutely beyond dispute. It was the denseness of the English ranks that most vividly struck their foes. 'Shield to shield, and shoulder to shoulder', as Æthelred describes them at the Battle of the Standard, they wedged themselves together so tightly that the wounded could not move, nor even the corpses drop. And so they stood together, the living and the dead.[63]
And we must remember that this mass of men was 'ranged so closely together in the thick array of the shield-wall, that while they only kept their ground the success of an assailant was hopeless'.[64] The Conqueror saw, Mr Freeman reminds us, 'that his only chance was to tempt the English to break their shield-wall'.[65] I need not insist on the point further: I need not even have said so much, but that some of those who read these pages may not have realized the true character of Mr Archer's phantasies. The 'scutorum testudo', as William of Malmesbury describes the famous shield-wall,[66] is depicted, with his usual painstaking care, by the designer of the Bayeux Tapestry. We read of the 'testudo' at Ashdown fight, even in the days of Alfred;[67] it was, again, with the shield-wall that 'glorious Æthelstan' won the day on the hard-fought field of Brunanburh (937);[68] we hear of it at Maldon (991), where Brihtnoth, we read, 'bade his men work the war-hedge',—'that is, had made his men form the shield-wall, a sort of fortress made by holding their shields close together'.[69] And we do, in Mr Freeman's words, meet with it 'down to the end', when the war-hedge of Maldon was wrought anew, by Harold, on the hill of battle, and stood once more as if a fortress—'quasi castellum'.
THE DISPOSITION OF THE ENGLISH
To render clear the problem involved, I must first sketch as briefly as possible the nature of the ground the English held. The hill of battle is so fully described in Mr Freeman's narrative that I here need only explain that it was a long narrow spur of the downs, running nearly east and west, of which the south front was defended by the English and attacked by the Normans. The one and only point that is certain is that 'on the very crown of the hill', the site of the high altar in the future, was erected the standard of Harold.[70] This, then, the centre of the hill, was the centre of the English host. But the ground to which our attention is directed, as having 'really played the most decisive part in the great event of the place', lay to the west of this, 'where the slope is gentlest of all, where the access to the natural citadel is least difficult'.[71] Mr Freeman assumes that this ground—the 'English right', as he terms it—where the 'ascent is easiest in itself', was allotted to 'the least trustworthy portion of the English army', to 'the sudden levies of the southern shires'.[72] For this assumption, I hasten to add, there is no authority whatever. He further assumes that the first English to leave their post, in pursuit of the enemy, 'were, of course, some of the defenders of the English right'.[73] William, he holds, at the crisis of the battle, resolved to draw them again from their post by a partial feigned retreat, that 'meanwhile another division might reach the summit through the gap thus left open'. Accordingly, tempted by this stratagem, 'the English on the right wing rushed down and pursued', and their error proved 'fatal to England'.[74]
The Duke's great object was now gained; the main end of Harold's skilful tactics had been frustrated by the inconsiderate ardour of the least valuable portion of his troops. Through the rash descent of the light-armed on the right, the whole English army lost its vantage-ground. The pursuing English had left the most easily accessible portion of the hill open to the approach of the enemy.... The main body of the Normans made their way on to the hill, no doubt by the gentle slope at the point west of the present buildings. The great advantage of the ground was now lost; the Normans were at last on the hill.[75]
Such is Mr Freeman's explanation of how the battle was won,[76] for in this episode he discovers the decisive turning-point of the day.[77]
Now, let us consider what is involved in the theory here set forth. 'Harold's skilful tactics', we find, consisted in entrusting his weakest point, the least defensible portion of his position, to 'the least trustworthy portion of the English army'. The natural result of these insane tactics was that his weak point was forced, and the English right turned.[78] And Mr Freeman, having made this clear, complains of 'the criticisms of monks on the conduct of a consummate general', and insists that 'nowhere is Harold's military greatness so distinctly felt as when ... we tread the battlefield of his own choice'. But there is worse to come. Such tactics as these would have been mad enough, even if these raw peasants had stood behind a barricade; but if, as I hold, that barricade is a purely imaginary creation, we ask ourselves what would have happened to these unhappy creatures, protected by no 'shield-wall', and armed with 'such rustic weapons as forks and sharp stakes',[79] when, first riddled by Norman arrows and then attacked by Norman infantry, they were finally, broken and defenceless, charged by heavy cavalry. The first onslaught would have scattered them to the winds, and have won, in so doing, the key of the English position.[80] Remembering this, it is strange to learn that 'the consummate generalship of Harold is nowhere more conspicuously shown than in this memorable campaign', and that his was 'that true skill of the leader of armies, which would have placed both Harold and William high among the captains of any age'. But if the generalship of Harold was shown by entrusting to his worst troops his weakest and most important point, while posting 'the flower of the English army' just where his ground was strongest, what are we to say of 'the generalship of William, his ready eye, his quick thought', if he failed to detect and avail himself of this glaring blunder? For instead of concentrating his attack upon Harold's weak point, he left it to be assailed, we learn, by 'what was most likely the least esteemed' portion of his host,[81] while he himself with his picked troops dashed himself against an impregnable position like a mad bull against a wall. 'We read,' says Mr Freeman, 'with equal admiration of the consummate skill with which Harold chose his position and his general scheme of action, and of the wonderful readiness with which William formed and varied his plans.' For myself, I should have thought that the tactics he describes—tactics which stirred him to a burst of admiration for 'the two greatest of living captains'—would have disgraced the most incompetent commander that ever took the field.
But Harold, after all, was no fool. Are we then justified in accusing him of this supreme folly? Mr Freeman held that 'the relative position of the different divisions in the two armies seems beyond doubt'. There is, however, as I said, absolutely no evidence for Mr Freeman's assumption that the English right was entrusted to the raw levies. Against it is the fact that in this quarter the first assault was soonest repulsed: against it also is all analogy drawn from the study of English tactics. Snorro's description of Stamfordbridge is evidence, at least, that 'the fortress of shields' had a continuous line of bucklers along its whole front: Æthelred gives us the reason in his story of the Battle of the Standard; namely, that it was the front line which had to meet the shock ('periculosum dicebant si primo aggressu inermes armatis occurrerent'). It was therefore an essential principle of tactics 'quatinus armati armatos impeterent, milites congrederentur militibus'.[82] Therefore on Cowton Moor (1138), as (I hold) on the hill of Battle (1066), we find the 'strenuissimi milites in prima fronte locati'.[83]
The words 'and the lighter troops behind them', which originally followed here, have been objected to by Miss Norgate, who had originally made the same statement,[84] but who now wishes to withdraw it.[85] Henry of Huntingdon, however—like Æthelred, a contemporary authority—agrees with him in describing the dismounted knights, men with shields and loricæ like the 'housecarls' at Hastings, as forming an 'iron wall' along the English front.[86] If then mailed warriors formed the front line, it is difficult to see where the 'inermis plebs', as Æthelred terms it, could be but 'behind them'. The fact is that the Battle of the Standard, for which we have excellent authorities, is of no small value for the study of the Battle of Hastings, as my opponents seem to be uncomfortably aware. 'The tactics,' Mr Freeman admits, 'were English.' We find there again the same dense array,[87] the same tactics for defence, though now rendered less passive by the development of the bowman.[88] There can, I think, be little question, if we combine the several accounts, that the Standard, with the older chiefs around it, formed the kernel of the host;[89] that the rude levies of the shire were massed round about them;[90] and that the outer rim was formed by the mailed knights, with the archers crouching for shelter behind their 'iron wall'.
Harking back to Sherstone fight (1016), we encounter precisely the same formation. 'The King,' Mr Freeman writes, 'placed his best troops in front, and the inferior part of his army in the rear.' And he added, 'we must remember these tactics when we come to the great fight of Senlac'.[91] This was, unhappily, just what he failed to do. 'William of Poitiers,' he strangely complained, 'has his head full of Agamemnon and of Xerxes, but this obvious analogy does not seem to have occurred to him.' Have we also the reason why our author himself overlooked these obvious analogies in the fact that to illustrate the Battle of Hastings he quotes some five and twenty times from the Odyssey and the Iliad, from Herodotus and Xenophon, from Æschylus, Plutarch, and Dio Cassius; from Livy, Tacitus, Ammianus, and even Ælius Spartianus? In his later edition, however, he inserted in a footnote the words: 'On placing the inferior troops in the rear, see the tactics of Eadmund at Sherstone.'[92] 'In the rear?' Yes, but that is precisely my contention. The assumption that I am assailing is that they formed the wings.
But we are not even here at the end of Mr Freeman's confusion. He had meanwhile, in another work, published about the same time as the first edition of his third volume, written thus:
As far as I can see, King Harold put these bad troops in the back ... But his picked men he put in front, where the best troops of the enemy were likely to come.[93]
This is exactly my own view; it is that 'essential principle of tactics' on which I have insisted throughout, and on which Miss Norgate has rashly endeavoured to pour contempt.[94] Mr Freeman, moreover, further on, wrote of his 'light armed' as 'the troops in the rear',[95] which is again my contention. What seems to have happened is that he got into his head (I can imagine how) that the 'light-armed' formed the wings, and arranged the battle on that assumption. Then remembering, when it was too late, that, according to his own precedent, they ought to have been in the rear, he hesitated to introduce a change which would affect his whole theory of the battle, and compel him to approach it de novo.[96]
But indeed, even apart from this, it seems doubtful, examining Mr Freeman's narrative, whether he had formed a clear conception of how the English troops were arranged, and whether, if so, he kept it in view, consistently, throughout. If we honestly seek to learn what his conception was, a careful comparison of pp. 472, 473, 475, 490, and 505, with the ground-plan, will show that the whole right wing was composed of 'light-armed troops, who broke their line to pursue'. And this view seems to be accepted and defended by Miss Norgate, who, writing as his champion, declares that to her the conclusion embodied in his ground-plan 'seems irresistible'.[97] On the other hand, pp. 471, 480, 487, and 732 most undoubtedly convey the impression that, as I have maintained, the heavy-armed English were extended along the whole front,[98] and that their defeat, in Mr Freeman's words (p. 732), was 'owing to their breaking the line of the shield-wall'. I suspect that he was led thus to contradict himself by the obvious concentration of his interest on 'the great personal struggle which was going on beneath the standard' (p. 487). Here, as is often the case throughout his work, Mr Freeman's treatment of his subject was essentially dramatic. To bring his heroes into high relief, he thrust into the background the rest of his scene as of comparatively small account. In this spirit, for instance, he wrote:
A new act in the awful drama of that day had now begun. The Duke himself, at the head of his own Normans, again pressed towards the standard.... A few moments more and the mighty rivals might have met face to face, and the war-club of the Bastard might have clashed against the lifted axe of the Emperor of Britain (p. 483).
Homer, doubtless, would have made them meet; but a great dramatic opportunity was lost: the 'mighty rivals' seem never to have got within striking distance. Meanwhile, however, the warring hosts are left quite in the background; their fate is that of a stage crowd engaged in a stage battle. I do not mean, of course, that Mr Freeman ignores them, but that he was so engrossed in the personal exploits of his heroes as to be impatient of that careful study which the battle as a whole required, and comparatively careless of consistency in his allusions to the English array.
The charge, in short, that I have brought throughout against the disposition of the English in Mr Freeman's narrative is that his view, 'with all that it involves, was based on no authority, was merely the offspring of his own imagination, and was directly at variance with the only precedent that he vouched for the purpose'.[99] There is absolutely not a scrap of evidence that—as shown on the 'accurate' ground-plan—the English army was drawn up in three divisions, the 'housecarls' forming the centre, and the 'light-armed' the two wings. We do not even know that it formed an almost straight line.[100] The whole arrangement is sheer guesswork, and analogy, here our only guide, is wholly against it.
I cannot insist too strongly on the charge I have here made. It is no 'matter of secondary importance';[101] nor is it the case that my argument as to the 'palisade' is, as Mr Archer pretended, 'the only definite and palpable charge' that I bring 'against Mr Freeman's account of the great battle'.[102] For, as I wrote from the very first, 'rejecting Mr Freeman's views on the groupings of the English host, we reject with them in toto the story he has built upon them'.[103]
My own view is based upon the fact that, in the military tactics as in the military architecture of the age, the defence trusted largely to its power of passive resistance: this was the essential principle of the ponderous Norman keep; and precisely as the walls of that keep were formed of an ashlar face of masonry backed by masses of rubble, so the fighting line of a force standing on the defensive was composed of a compact facing of heavily-armed troops backed by a rabble of half-armed peasants, or at best by what we may term the light infantry of the day. When the foe was advancing to the attack, these rear lines could discharge such weapons as they possessed—darts, arrows, stones, etc.—from behind the shelter of their comrades,[104] while at the moment of actual shock they would form a passive backing, which would save the front ranks from being broken by the enemy's impact. As the great object of the attack was to break through the line, a formation which virtually gave the advantage now possessed by a solid over a hollow square would naturally commend itself to the defence.
Now in these tactics we have the key to the true story of the battle. But, first, we must dismiss from our minds Mr Freeman's fundamental assumption, and understand that the English 'hoplites' were not massed in the centre, but were extended along the whole front, precisely as they were in battles fought both before and after. The fighting face of Harold's host was composed of this heavy soldiery, clad in helmets and mail. Arrayed in the closest order, they presented to an advancing enemy the aspect of a living rampart ('quasi castellum').
How the Normans attacked that rampart it will now be my task to show.
THE NORMAN ADVANCE
From Telham Hill Duke William scanned that living rampart, and saw clearly that 'his only chance was to tempt the English to break their shield-wall'.[105] It is chiefly from Baudri's poem that we learn how he set about it.[106]
There is no question that the fight began with an advance of the Norman infantry. William of Poitiers and Bishop Guy are in complete accordance on the fact.[107] But as my description of the infantry has been challenged,[108] I may show that it is quite beyond dispute.[109] To my argument, as reprinted below, it has been objected that I fail 'to take account of the distinction between light-armed and heavy-armed infantry'.[110] It will be seen that my argument turns, not on the armour, but on the weapons of the foot. I have challenged my opponents to produce mention of any weapons but crossbows,[111] or bows and arrows, and need scarcely say that they cannot.
Describing the 'armour and weapons of the Normans', Mr Freeman, avowedly following the Tapestry, represented the infantry as all archers,[112] and divided them into two classes: (1) those 'without defensive harness'; (2) those who 'wore the defences common to the horse and foot of both armies ... the close-fitting coat of mail ... and the conical helmet'.[113] Now this division is exactly reproduced in the words of William of Poitiers, who divides his 'pedites' into two classes, distinguished only by the fact that in one were the 'firmiores et loricatos'. He does not say that the latter were not archers, or crossbowmen, nor did Mr Freeman venture to assign them any other weapons.[114] Bishop Guy, moreover, distinctly tells us that they were crossbowmen (vide infra). The advance, therefore, in modern language, consisted of skirmishers, represented by archers and perhaps some crossbowmen; supports, namely, crossbowmen who, as a somewhat superior class, would mostly have defensive armour; and, lastly, the cavalry as reserve.[115]
Now what was the intention of this advance? Mr Freeman assumed, without hesitation, that the foot 'were to strive to break down the palisades ... and so to make ready the way for the charge of the horse' (p. 467); that 'the infantry were, therefore, exposed to the first and most terrible danger' (Ibid.); 'that the French infantry had to toil up the hill, and to break down the palisade' (p. 477).[116] But we find, on reference, that the above writers say nothing of any such intention, and do not even mention the existence of a palisade.[117] Moreover, the only weapons they speak of are crossbows and bows and arrows, which are scarcely the tools for pioneers. But William of Poitiers puts us on the track of a very different explanation: 'Pedites itaque Normanni propius accedentes provocant Anglos, missilibus in eos vulnera dirigunt atque necem'. Here Baudri comes to our aid:
Nam neque Normannus consertos audet adire
Nec valet a cuneo quemlibet excipere.
Arcubus utantur dux imperat atque balistis;
Nam prius has mortes Anglia tunc didicit.
Tunc didicere mori quam non novere sagitta
Creditur a cælo mors super ingruere
Hos velut a longe comitatur militis agmen,
Palantes post se miles ut excipiat.
The Normans dared not face the serried ranks of the English: the maxim that cavalry should not charge unbroken infantry was asserting itself already. But the only means of breaking those ranks, of throwing the English into confusion, was to gall them by archers and slingers till some of them should sally forth, when their assailants would turn tail and leave them to be caught in the open and ridden down. As Bishop Guy expresses it:
Præmisit pedites committere bella sagittis,
Et balistantes inserit in medio,
Quatinus infigant volitantia vultibus arma,
Vulneribusque datis ora retro faciant,
Ordine post pedites sperat stabilire Quirites
These tactics, says Baudri, were crowned with success; the maddened English, as they dashed forth to strike their tormentors to the ground, were cut off in every direction by the horsemen waiting their chance:
Tunc præ tristitia gens effera præque pudore
Egreditur palans, insequiturque vagos.
Normanni simulantque fugam fugiuntque fugantes,
Intercepit eos undique præpes equus.
Ilico cæduntur; sic paulatim minuuntur,
Nec minuebatur callidus ordo ducis.
This account is both intelligible and consistent, but differs wholly from that of Mr Freeman. It had, however, been virtually anticipated by Mr Oman, who in his Art of War in the Middle Ages (p. 25), points out, with much felicity, that
the archers, if unsupported by the knights, could easily have been driven off the field by a general charge. United, however, by the skilful tactics of William, the two divisions of the invading army won the day. The Saxon mass was subjected to exactly the same trial which befell the British squares in the battle of Waterloo: incessant charges by a gallant cavalry were alternated with a destructive fire of missiles. Nothing can be more maddening than such an ordeal to the infantry soldier, rooted to the spot by the necessities of his formation.
Let us compare the two theories. Mr Freeman's, here again, is not even consistent. He first tells us that for the knights to charge, with 'the triple palisade still unbroken, would have been sheer madness'; in fact it was 'altogether useless' for them to advance until the infantry had broken down the palisade.[118] But this the infantry failed to do,[119] whereupon—the cavalry charged 'the impenetrable fortress of timber' (p. 479)! One is surely reminded of the immortal Don, when 'a todo el galope de Rocinante', he charged the windmill.
My own theory involves no such inconsistencies. I hold—not as a conjecture based on a hypothetical palisade, but on the excellent authority of Baudri and William of Poitiers, that the infantry were used for the definite purpose of galling the English by their missiles, and so enticing them to leave their ranks and become a prey to the horse. As soon as their line had thus been broken, the cavalry were to charge.
Up to this point, the English army, as a whole, had kept its formation; but now the strain on its patience had become too great to be borne. Breaking its ranks, with one accord, the whole host rushed upon its foes, and drove them before it in confusion right up to the Duke's post:
Tandem jactura gens irritata frequenti,
Ordinibus spretis irruit unanimis.
Tunc quoque plus solito fugientum terga cecidit,
Et miles vultum fugit ad usque ducis.
This explains what had always been to me a difficulty, namely, the panic-stricken flight of the Normans at this stage of the battle. That they should have 'lost heart' (p. 480) at the firmness of the English is natural enough; but that they should have 'turned and fled' (Ibid.) from a force which did not pursue them seemed improbable. The difficulty is solved by Baudri's mention of the wild onslaught by the English. Moreover, Bishop Guy's description of the rout of the assailants—which Mr Freeman assigned to this stage of the battle—agrees well with that of Baudri:
Anglorum populus, numero superante, repellit
Hostes inque retro compulit ora dari;
Et fuga ficta prius fit tunc virtute coacta;
Normanni fugiunt, dorsa tegunt clipei.
Again, Baudri's poem suggests a novel view by its definite statement that the Normans in their flight reached the Duke's post. Mr Freeman imagined that the Duke himself had been fighting in the front line (pp. 479, 480), but a careful comparison of his two authorities, William of Poitiers and Bishop Guy (p. 482), will show that, on the contrary, they support Baudri's statement. Each speaks of the Duke as 'meeting' (occurrens—occurrit) the fugitives, a difficulty which Mr Freeman evaded by writing that 'he met or pursued the fugitives'.
From this flight the Normans were rallied by the desperate efforts of the Duke himself, who, as is usual at such moments, was believed to have fallen. I deem this episode a fixed point, and it conveniently divides the battle. All our four leading authorities—the Tapestry, William of Poitiers, Bishop Guy, and Baudri—are here in complete agreement. William describes the Duke as 'nudato insuper capite'; Guy tells us that 'iratus galea nudat et ipse caput'; Baudri writes 'subito galeam submovet a capite'; in the Tapestry, 'William (writes Dr Bruce), when he wishes to show himself in order to contradict the rumour that he has been killed, is obliged to lift his helmet almost off his head' (p. 98). It is singular that so striking and well-established an episode is wholly ignored by Wace.
THE FOSSE DISASTER
The serious character of the assailants' flight is duly recognized by Mr Freeman.[120] We could have no more eloquent witness to the fact than the admission even by William of Poitiers that the Duke's Normans themselves gave way, or the description of them by Bishop Guy as 'gens sua victa'. The only point in question here is whether what I call 'the fosse disaster' was an incident of this headlong flight or happened at a later stage of the battle. Mr Freeman, discussing 'the order of events',[121] faced the difficulty frankly, observing that Guy had placed the feigned flight before what I have termed above the dividing incident of the day, and that this view 'may be thought to be confirmed by the Tapestry', etc., etc. We have here perhaps the most difficult problem raised in the course of the battle, and one which it would be easier and safer to pass over in silence. As to Guy, I suggest, as a possible solution—it does not profess to be more—that what he was describing was not the great feigned flight but the lesser manœuvres of the same character described by Baudri above. He may, of course, have transferred to these the importance of the later episode. On the real flight, at least, he is sound. Of the Tapestry I would speak with more confidence. 'In the nature of things,' Mr Freeman wrote, 'exact chronological order is not its strongest point' (p. 768). But in this case there was nothing to make it depart from that order, no reason why it should not place the incident of 'the fosse disaster' after the central incident of the day, instead of before, if that were its right position. Moreover, it is here, we find, in the closest agreement with Wace; and though I claim, as did Mr Freeman, the right of rejecting his testimony when wholly unsupported (as still more, when opposed to probability), yet such marked agreement as this is not to be lightly cast aside.
In any case, nothing can be more unfortunate than Mr Freeman's treatment of what he describes as the 'great slaughter of the French in the western ravine' (p. 489). This is a scene invented by Mr Freeman alone, and illustrates the peculiar use he made, at times, of his authorities. There is no question that the Norman knights suffered, in the course of the day, at least one such disaster as the nobles of France at Courtrai (1302) or her cuirassiers at Waterloo. But five authorities, so far as one can see, place the incident in the thick of the battle, while three others assign it to the pursuit of the defeated English. It is not strange, therefore, that some writers should have held that there was but one such incident: Mr Freeman, however, holds that there were two; and I expressly disclaim questioning his view, the matter being one of opinion. Assuming then, as he does, that the episode occurred in the course of the battle, I turn to the spirited version of Wace, as Mr Archer defies me to 'impeach Wace's authority' (p. 346). The 'old Norman poet' is here very precise. He first tells us (ll. 7869-70, 8103-6) that the English had made a 'fosse', which the Normans had passed unnoticed in their advance.[122] These passages Mr Freeman accepts without question (p. 476). But then Wace proceeds to state (ll. 8107-20) that the Normans, driven back, as we have seen, by the English, tumbled, men and horses, into this treacherous 'fosse' and perished in great numbers. Now Wace, far from standing alone, is here in curiously close agreement with the Tapestry of Bayeux. Two successive scenes in that 'most authetic record' are styled 'Hic ceciderunt simul Angli et Franci in prœlio; hic Odo episcopus baculum tenens confortat pueros.' Wace describes these scenes in thirty-six lines (ll. 8103-38), devoting eighteen lines to the first and the same number to the second. Actual comparison alone can show how close the agreement is. Henry of Huntingdon, we may add, independently confirms the statement that English as well as French perished in the fatal fosse.[123]
Now all this is quite opposed to Mr Freeman's 'conception of the battle'. He had, therefore, to adapt, with no gentle hands, his authorities to his requirements. Cinderella's stepmother, when her daughter's foot could not be got into the golden shoe, armed herself, we read, with axe and scissors, and trimmed it to the requisite shape. With no less decision the late Professor set about his own task. Wace's evidence he simply suppressed; Henry of Huntingdon's he ignored; but that of the Bayeux Tapestry could not be so easily disposed of. I invite particular attention to his treatment of this, his 'highest authority'. Retaining in its natural place (pp. 481-2) the second of the two scenes we have described, he threw forward the one preceding it to a later stage of the battle (p. 490). Nor did his vigorous adaptation stop even here. The scene thus wrenched from its place depicts a single incident: mounted Normans are tumbling headlong into a ditch at the foot of a mound, on which 'light-armed' English stand assailing them with their weapons. The fight is hand to hand; the bodies touch. And yet the Professor treats this scene as a description of two quite separate events happening at a distance from each other. These he terms (p. 489) the 'stand of the English at the detached hill'; and the 'great slaughter of the French in the western ravine'. But on referring to his own ground-plan, we find that this 'ravine' and the 'detached hill' were a quarter of a mile apart, with the slopes of the main hill between them.
My criticism here is twofold. In the first place, Mr Freeman endeavoured to conceal the liberties he had taken with his leading authority. No one would gather from his narrative of the battle that any such violence had been used; nor would anyone who read of the 'hill' episode that 'the scene is vividly shown in the Tapestry' (p. 489), and, subsequently, of the 'ravine' disaster, that 'this scene is most vividly shown in the Tapestry' (p. 490), imagine that 'the incidents of the ravine and the little hill' (p. 768) are in the Tapestry one and the same. In the second place, the large part which the writer's own imagination plays in his narrative of the fight is here clearly seen. There is nothing, for instance, in any authority to connect 'the western ravine' with 'the great slaughter of the French'. It is placed by those who mention it in a 'fosse', 'fossatum', or 'fovea'. 'If Wace is any authority,' to quote Mr Archer's words, 'the question is settled once and for all';[124] the slaughter took place not in the 'ravine', but in a ditch which according to him, the English had dug to the south of the hill, and which, according to Henry of Huntingdon, they had cunningly concealed. Mr Freeman produces no authority in support of his own fancy; his only argument is that the slaughter
must have happened somewhere to the south or south-west of the hill. The small ravine to the south-west seems exactly what is wanted (p. 771).
The 'western ravine' however, does not fulfil these requirements (see ground-plan, where it lies to the north-west of the hill); while Wace's 'fosse', which—though here ignoring it—he had already accepted, lay, as required, to the south of the hill. Wace mentions another instance (ll. 1737-50) in which this stratagem was adopted,[125] but whether our ditch was dug, as he states, expressly or not, the fact of its existence does not depend on his evidence alone.
To resume: accepting provisionally Mr Freeman's view (iii. 770) that there were two disasters to the horse, one 'happening comparatively early in the battle', and the other 'which William of Poitiers, Orderic and the Battle chronicler place at the very end of the battle', as occurring in the pursuit of the defeated English, we find that the former is mentioned by five writers. The Tapestry and Wace agree absolutely in making it an episode of the real flight of the Normans before the great rally; Henry of Huntingdon assigns it to the great feigned flight, later in the battle; William of Malmesbury seems to make it happen during the pursuit by the Normans after their feigned flight; the anonymous writer quoted by Andresen (ii. 713) from Le Prevost may be left out of the question. Yet, in spite of all this contradiction, Mr Freeman assigns this striking episode, not as a conjecture, but as historic fact, to the pursuit of the English by the 'Bretons'[126] after the feigned flight (p. 489). Let me make my position clear. We expect an historian to weigh, as an expert, the evidence before him: we look to him for guidance where that evidence is conflicting. But we have a right to protest against the statement, as historic fact, of hypotheses which cannot be established, and which are quite possibly wrong. Where the evidence is flatly contradictory, the fact that it is so should be made clear; conflicting statements should not be evaded, nor evidence, such as that of the Tapestry, appealed to, when it proves to be opposed to, not in favour of, the writer's hypothesis. Dealing with the Conqueror's march on London, after his great victory, Mr Parker has insisted with much force, on the principle for which I am contending.
Though, by leaving out here and there the discrepancies, the residue may be worked up into a consecutive and consistent series of events, such a process amounts to making history, not writing it. Amidst a mass of contradictory evidence, it is impossible to arrive at any sure conclusion.... It is, however, comparatively easy to piece together such details as will fit of the various stories, and still more easy to discover reasons for the results which such mosaic work produces ... [but] it cannot be reasonably regarded as real history. The method by which the results are obtained bears too close a resemblance to that by which ... some of the legends described in the fifth chapter have come to be accepted as historical narratives.[127]
That is the danger. Such a narrative as that which Mr Freeman has given us must 'come to be accepted as historical' if allowed to pass current without a grave warning. It will doubtless be replied that in his appendices, he frankly admits that 'it is often hard to reconcile the various accounts'; but the question at issue is whether one is justified when, as here, the various accounts are not only 'hard' but impossible to reconcile, in constructing a definite narrative at all, instead of honestly admitting that the matter must be left in doubt.
THE GREAT FEIGNED FLIGHT
There is no feature of the famous battle more familiar or more certain than that of the feigned retreat. It is necessary here to grasp Mr Freeman's view, because he discovers in this manœuvre and its results the decisive turning point of the day.[128]
That there was a great feigned flight, which induced a large portion of the English to break their formation and pursue their foes, is beyond question.[129] But Mr Freeman, on this foundation, built up a legend, for which, we shall find, there exists no evidence whatever. He first assumed that it was 'most likely' the left wing of the assailants which 'turned in seeming flight'[130] (p. 488), and that it was, consequently, 'the English on the right wing' who 'rushed down and pursued them'. Thus:
Through the rash descent of the light-armed on the right, the whole English army lost its vantage ground. The pursuing English had left the most easily accessible portion of the hill open to the approach of the enemy (p. 490).
The result, of course, was that 'the main body of the Normans made their way on the hill, no doubt by the gentle slope' at this point (Ibid.).
The great advantage of the ground was now lost; the Normans were at last on the hill. Instead of having to cut their way up the slope, and through the palisades, they could now charge to the east right against the defenders of the standard (Ibid.).
These words are most important. They set forth Mr Freeman's theory that Harold now found the Normans charging down upon his right flank instead of attacking him in front. It was in this sense I wrote 'that his weak point was forced, and the English right turned', as the natural result of the 'insane' tactics attributed to him by his champion.[131] The manœuvre assigned by Mr Freeman to the Duke is, in fact, that by which Marlborough won the battle of Ramillies, where he got on to the hill by dislodging the French right, and then wheeled to his own right, outflanking the French centre.
When we turn from this elaborate theory to the authorities on which it is supposed to be based, we find, with some astonishment, that it is all sheer imagination. William of Poitiers, on whom the writer seemed mainly to rely for the feigned flight, states that:
Normanni sociaque turba ... terga dederunt, fugam ex industriâ simulantes—
words which distinctly imply that this feigned flight was general. Henry of Huntingdon merely writes: 'Docuit Dux Willelmus genti suæ fugam simulare.' No one, certainly, says or implies that it was restricted to the left wing. As for the theory that 'the main body of the Normans' were, by this manœuvre, enabled to seize the western portion of the hill, and thus attack Harold on his flank, it is more imaginary, if possible, still.
The fact is that, as I explained in my original article,[132] Mr Freeman had wholly misconceived the nature of William's manœuvre. The feigned flight was not a simple (as he supposed), but a combined movement. The best account of that movement is found in the Battle Chronicle:
Tandem strenuissimus Boloniæ comes Eustachius clam, callida præmeditata arte—fugam cum exercitu duce simulante—super Anglos sparsim agiliter insequentes cum manu valida a tergo irruit, sicque et duce hostes ferociter invadente ipsis interclusis utrinque prosternuntur innumeri.
This precise statement, which Mr Freeman omits,[133] affords the clue we seek, explaining the words of William of Poitiers, 'interceptos et inclusos undique mactaverunt'. The retreat of the pursuing English was cut off by the Count's squadrons, and, caught 'between two fires', they were cut down and butchered. The supposition that, while this was going on, the main body of the Normans was riding on to the hill is baseless. The whole host, we have seen, were below, surrounding the English who had left the hill. Had Mr Freeman kept in mind, as he had intended to do, the employment of this old Norman device at the relief of Arques (1053), he would have seen more clearly what really happened. But this, precisely as with his Sherstone precedent, he failed to do.
THE RELIEF OF ARQUES
To illustrate the feigned flight by analogy, I append this passage relating to the stratagem at Arques.
A plan was speedily devised; an ambush was laid; a smaller party was sent forth to practise that stratagem of pretended flight which Norman craft was to display thirteen years later [1066] on a greater scale. The Normans turned; the French pursued; presently the liers-in-wait were upon them, and the noblest and bravest of the invading host were slaughtered or taken prisoners before the eyes of their king (iii. 133).
The manœuvre is elaborately described by Wace (ll. 3491-514) in a passage which ought to be compared, in places, with that on the great 'feinte fuie' itself (ll. 8203-70).
He carefully distinguishes the two parties essential to the stratagem:[134]
Partie pristrent des Normanz,
Des forz e des mielz cumbatanz,
. . . . .
Puis pristrent une autre partie, etc., etc.
The latter detachment turned in flight and decoyed some of the leading Frenchmen past the spot where the ambush was laid. Then, facing round, they caught their rash pursuers 'between two fires'. I have shown above, from the 'precise statement' which is found in the 'Battle Chronicle', that the great manœuvre which deceived the English was a similarly combined one. Mr Freeman, completely missing this point, makes the Norman 'division', which did not take part in the flight 'ride up the hill' (p. 490), where its slopes were deserted, whereas, on the contrary, they thrust themselves between the pursuers and the hill, and then charged on their rear, riding, of course, not on to, but away from the hill.
So close is the Arques parallel that in Wace we find the same words occurring in both cases:
| A cels kis alouent chazant E quis alouent leidissant Sunt enmi le vis tresturne, E Franceis sunt a els mesdle (ll. 3501-4); | Engleis les aloent gabant E de paroles laidissant . . . . Torne lor sunt enmi le vis . . . . E as Engleis entremesler (ll. 8241-2, 8262-4); |
while William of Malmesbury describes the French king as thus 'astutia insidiis exceptus', just as he describes Harold, in turn as thus 'astutiâ Willelmi circumventus'. Mr Freeman quoted both passages, yet failed to note the parallel.
I speak, it will be seen, of 'the relief of Arques'. As my critic so rashly assumed that in my original article I exhausted Mr Freeman's errors,[135] I may point out that this subject introduces us, at once, to fresh ones. Our author, for instance, held that Arques was not relieved. Let us see. We are first rightly told, on the authority of William of Poitiers, that the Duke blockaded the stronghold (munitio) by erecting a castellum at its foot (p. 128). On the next page we are told that the latter was 'a wooden tower'—which is precisely what it was not—and that it 'is described as a munitio' by William of Poitiers, whereas that term, as we have just seen, denoted, on the contrary, the rebel stronghold itself. Then we are told that the French king marched to the relief of the rebels, bringing with him 'a good stock of provisions, of corn, and of wine' for the purpose, but 'was far from being successful in his enterprise' (p. 131). In fact, he 'went home, having done nothing towards the immediate object of his journey—the relief of the besieged' (p. 137). Mr Freeman added in a note: 'So I understand the not very clear statement of William of Poitiers that the King went away.' Now, William's statement (which is quoted by him) is absolutely clear:
Perveniens tamen quo ire intenderat, Rex exacerbatissimis animis summâ vi præsidium attentavit: Willelmum ab ærumnis uti eriperet, pariter decrementum sui, stragem suorum vindicaret.
The King, that is, in spite of the ambush, reached his destination (the blockaded stronghold) and then furiously attacked the castellum below, with the double object of raising the blockade and of avenging the death of his followers. Wace is, if possible, even more explicit. After describing the affair of the ambush, he proceeds thus:
Les somiers fist apareilier,
La garisun prendre e chargier,
À la tur d'Arches fist porter,
Il meisme fu al mener (II. ll. 3519-22).
Arques, therefore, was duly relieved; the blockading party being only strong enough to defend, when attacked, its own castellum.
We will certainly not say of Mr Freeman that he had not read his Wace 'with common care'—to quote from his criticism on Professor Pearson—but really, when more suo he corrected ex cathedrâ the faults of others, he might at least have made sure of his facts. We will take (from the narrative of the Battle of Hastings) the case of the knighting of Harold on the eve of the Breton war:
| Wace | Mr Freeman |
|---|---|
| E Heraut out iloc geu, E par la Lande fu passez, Quant il fu duc amenez, Qui a Aurenches donc esteit E en Bretaigne aler deueit, La le fist li dus chevalier [ll. 13720-5]. | Mr Planché says that Wace lays the scene at Avranches. He probably refers to the Roman de Rou, 13723, but the knighthood is not there spoken of (p. 229). |
But it is only the feigned flight that connects the Battle of Hastings with Arques and its blockade. We read, as the battle is about to begin, of 'the aged Walter Giffard, the lord of Longueville, the hero of Arques and Mortemer' (p. 457). As our author breaks the thread of his narrative (pp. 128-37) to tell us in detail about those whose names occur in it, we need not scruple in this instance to do the same. Turning back, therefore, we read:
The chief who now commanded below the steep of Arques lived to refuse to bear the banner of Normandy below the steep of Senlac ... and to found, like so many others among the baronage of Normandy, a short-lived earldom in the land which he helped to conquer (p. 123).
In the act of that refusal he is thus described:
Even in the days of Arques [1053] and Mortimer [1054] he was an aged man, and now [1066] he was old indeed; his hair was white, his arm was failing (p. 465).
Yet we meet the veteran again, a generation later, as 'old Walter Giffard, now [1090] Earl of Buckingham, in England ... the aged warrior of Arques and Senlac' (W.R., i. 231). 'Nor do we wonder,' we read, 'to find,' among the supporters of William Rufus in 1095, 'the name of Walter Giffard, him [sic] who appeared as an aged man forty years before' (W.R., i. 472). But even Mr Freeman admits that 'we are somewhat surprised to find', among the opponents of Henry I in 1101, 'now at the very end of his long life, the aged Walter Giffard, lord of Longueville, and Earl of Buckingham' (W.R., ii. 395). Surprised? We are indeed; for, if he was 'an aged man' half a century before, what must he have been when he joined the rebels in 1101? It reminds one of a delightful passage in the quaint 'Memorie of the Somervells', where the artless author, speaking of the action, in 1213, of his ancestor 'being then near the nyntieth and fourth year of his age', observes:
What could have induced him ... to join himself with the rebellious barrons at such an age, when he could not act any in all human probabilitie, and was as unfit for counsel, is a thing to be admired, but not understood or knowne.
One need scarcely point out that Mr Freeman has confused two successive bearers of the name. The confusion is avoided by the Duchess of Cleveland in her work on 'The Battle Abbey Roll', as it had been by Planché and previous writers.
I here notice it chiefly as illustrating Mr Freeman's ready acceptance of even glaring improbabilities.
But one of the most singular flaws in the late Professor's work was his evident tendency to confuse two or more persons bearing the same name. Three or four Leofstans of London were rolled by him into one; Henry of Essex was identified with a Henry who had a different father and who lived in Cumberland; while a whole string of erroneous conclusions followed, we saw, from identifying Osbern 'filius Ricardi' with Osbern 'cognomine Pentecost'.[136] It is strange that one who was so severe on confusion of identity where places were concerned[137] should have been, in the case of persons, guilty of that confusion.
SUMMARY
I would now briefly recapitulate the points I claim to have established. We have seen, in the first place, that Mr Freeman's disposition of the English forces is, with all that it involves, nothing but a sheer guess—a guess to which he did not consistently adhere, and to which his own precedent, moreover, is directly opposed. Secondly, as to the 'palisade' which formed, according to him, so prominent a feature of the battle, we have found that of the passages he vouched for its existence only one need even be considered; and that one, according to himself, where he last quotes and deals with it, describes, not a palisade but the time-honoured 'array of the shield-wall'.[138] Then, passing to the battle and taking it stage by stage, I have shown that on its opening phase he went utterly astray in search of an imaginary assault on a phantom palisade; we have seen how another such guess transported to 'the western ravine' a catastrophe which, even on his own showing, must have happened somewhere else, and assigned it to a stage of the battle which is quite possibly the wrong one. We have watched him missing the point of the great feigned flight and failing to see how Norman craft caught the English in a trap. And lastly, the critical manœuvre of the day, by which the Duke's great object was gained, and 'the great advantage of the ground lost' to the English, proves on inquiry—although introduced, like other assertions, as a historic fact—to be yet another unsupported guess: for the statement that by this manœuvre 'the Normans were at last on the hill' and could thus 'charge to the east right against the defenders of the Standard' there is absolutely no foundation.
We have now—confining ourselves to points as to which there can be no question—examined Mr Freeman's account of the Battle of Hastings. It is, as I showed at the outset, the very crown and flower of his work, and it is, I venture to assert, mistaken in its essential points. Must it, then, be cast aside as simply erroneous and misleading? Hardly. In the words of his own criticism on Mr Coote's Romans in Britain: 'It ought to be read, if only as a curious study, to show how utterly astray an ingenious and thoroughly well-informed man can go.' For there is the true conclusion. The possession of exhaustive knowledge, the devotion of unsparing pains—neither of these were wanting. Then 'wanting is—what?' Men have differed and will always differ, as to how history should be written; but on one point we are all agreed. The true historian is he, and he only, who, from the evidence before him, can divine the facts. Other qualities are welcome, but this is the essential gift. And it was because, here at least, he lacked in that, in spite of all his advantages, in spite of his genius and his zeal, our author, in his story of this battle, failed as we have seen.
Mr Freeman held that his predecessors, Thierry and Sir Francis Palgrave, 'singularly resemble each other in a certain lack of critical power'. His own lack, as I conceive it, was of a somewhat different kind. For if he studied the text and weighed the value of his authorities, yet he was often liable to danger from his tendency to a parti pris. Setting out with his own impression, he read his texts in the light of that impression rather than with an open mind. Thus we might say of his 'very lucid and original account' of the great battle, as he said of Mr Coote's work: 'The truth of the whole matter is that all this very ingenious but baseless fabric has been built upon the foundation of a single error.' Had he not stumbled at the outset over that 'quasi castellum', he might never have erected that 'ingenious but baseless fabric'. As it is, while the battle should be largely rewritten, preserving only such incidents as are taken straight from the authorities, the accompanying plan must be wholly destroyed. Till then, as Dr Stubbs has said of the discovery that 'Ingulf' was a forgery, 'it remains a warning light, a wandering marshfire, to caution the reader not to accept too abjectly the conclusions of his authority'.
What then remains, it may be asked, of Mr Freeman's narrative? When one remembers its superb vividness, carrying us away in spite of ourselves, one is tempted to reply, in his own words on the saga of Stamfordbridge:
We have, indeed, a glorious description which, when critically examined, proves to be hardly more worthy of belief than a battlepiece in the Iliad.... Such is the magnificent legend which has been commonly accepted as the history of this famous battle.... And it is disappointing that, for so detailed and glowing a tale, we have so little of authentic history to substitute (pp. 365-8).
For, as he has so justly observed, when dismissing as 'mythical' this 'famous and magnificent saga' (pp. 328-9), 'a void is left which history cannot fill, and which it is forbidden to the historian to fill up from the resources of his own imagination'.
Accepting the principle here enunciated by Mr Freeman himself, I do not merely reject demonstrably erroneous statements. I protest against his giving us a narrative drawn 'from the resources of his own imagination'. It is no answer to say that his guesses cannot be actually proved to be wrong; the historian cannot distinguish too sharply between statements drawn from his authorities and guesses, however ingenious, representing imagination alone. No one I am sure, reading Mr Freeman's brilliant narrative, could imagine how largely his story of the battle is based on mere conjecture.
What the battle really was may be thus tersely expressed—it was Waterloo without the Prussians. The Normans could avail nothing against that serried mass.
Dash'd on every rocky square,
Their surging charges foam'd themselves away.
As Mr Oman has so well observed, the Norman horse might have surged for ever 'around the impenetrable shield-wall'.[139] It was only, as he and Mr Hunt[140] have shown, by the skilful combination of horsemen and archers, by the maddening showers of arrows between the charges of the horse, that the English, especially the lighter armed, were stung into breaking their formation and abandoning that passive defence to which they were unfortunately restricted. 'While no mode of array could be stronger so long as the line remained unbroken, it made it hard to form the line again.'[141] Dazzled by the rapid movements of their foes, now advancing, now retreating, either in feint or in earnest, the English, in places, broke their line, and then the Duke, as Mr Oman writes, 'thrust his horsemen into the gaps'.[142] All this is quite certain, and is what the authorities plainly describe. Let us, then, keep to what we know. Is it not enough for us to picture the English line stubbornly striving to the last to close its broken ranks, the awful scene of slaughter and confusion, as the Old Guard of Harold, tortured by Norman arrows, found the horsemen among them at last, slashing and piercing right and left. Still the battle-axe blindly smote; doggedly, grimly still they fought, till the axes dropped from their lifeless grasp. And so they fell.
Mr Archer, when he first came forward to defend 'Mr Freeman's account of the great battle',[143] observed that I claimed 'here to prove the entire inadequacy of Mr Freeman's work', that I held him 'wrong, completely wrong in his whole conception of the battle'.[144] And he admitted that
'such a contention, it will at once be perceived, is very different from any mere criticism of detail; it affects the centre and the very heart of Mr Freeman's work. If he could blunder here in the most carefully elaborated passage of his whole history, he could blunder anywhere; his reputation for accuracy would be gone almost beyond hope of retrieving it' (p. 336).
'Blunder', surely, is a harsh word. I would rather say that the historian is seen here at his strongest and at his weakest: at his weakest in his tendency to follow blindly individual authorities in turn, instead of grasping them as a whole, and, worse still, in adapting them, at need, to his own preconceived notions; at his strongest, in his Homeric power of making the actors in his drama live and move before us. Not in vain has 'the wand of the enchanter', as an ardent admirer once termed it, been waved around Harold and his host. We are learning from recent German researches how the narratives of early Irish warfare are 'perfectly surrounded with magic'; how, for instance, at the battle of Culdreimne 'a Druid wove a magic hedge, which he placed before the army as a hindrance to the enemy'. But spells are now no longer wrought
With woven paces and with waving hands;
and the Druid's hedge must go the way of our own magician's 'palisade'.
But, as I foresaw, in his eagerness to prove, at least, the existence of a palisade, my critic was soon reduced to impugning Mr Freeman's own supreme authority, and at last to throwing over Mr Freeman himself. 'Incidit in Scyllam cupiens vitare Charybdim.' Sneering[145] at what the historian termed his 'highest', his 'primary' authority, that 'precious monument', the Bayeux Tapestry—merely because it will not square with his views—he rejects utterly Mr Freeman's theory as to its date and origin,[146] and substitutes one which the Professor described as 'utterly inconceivable'.[147] He has further informed us that 'common sense' tells him that the English axemen cannot possibly have fought 'in the close array of the shield-wall', as Mr Freeman says they did.[148] And then he finally demolishes Mr Freeman's 'conception of the battle' by dismissing 'an imaginary shield-wall',[149] and assuring us that the absurd vision of 'an extended shield-wall vanishes like smoke'.[150]
It is impossible not to pity Mr Freeman's would-be champion. Scorning, at the outset, the thought that his hero could err 'in the most carefully elaborated passage of his whole history',[151] his attitude of bold defiance was a joy to Mr Freeman's friends.[152]
ἀμφὶ δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ αὐτῷ βαῖνε λέων ὥς ἀλκὶ πεποιθώς,
πρόσθε δέ οἱ δύρυ τ᾽ ἔσχε καὶ ἀσπίδα πάντος ἐίσην,
τὸν κτάμεναι μεμαὼς ὄς τις τοῦ γ᾽ ἀντίος ἔλθοι,
σμερδαλέα ἰάχων.
But his wildly brandished weapon proved more deadly to friend than foe: he discovered, as I knew, he could only oppose me by making jettison of Mr Freeman's views. Of this we have seen above examples striking enough; but the climax was reached in his chief contention, namely, that the lines in the Roman de Rou, which describe, Mr Freeman asserted, 'the array of the shield-wall',[153] cannot, on many grounds, be 'referred to a shield-wall'.[154] No contradiction could be more complete. So he now finds himself forced to write:
I do not say—I have never said—that I agree with every word that Mr Freeman has written about the great battle; but I do regard his account of Hastings as the noblest battle-piece in our historical literature—perhaps in that of the world.[155]
'O most lame and impotent conclusion!' We are discussing whether that account is 'right', not whether it is 'noble'. To the splendour of that narrative I have borne no sparing witness. I have spoken of its 'superb vividness', I have praised its 'epic grandeur', I have dwelt on the writer's 'Homeric power of making the actors in his drama live and move before us', and have compared his tale with the 'glorious description' in the saga of Stamfordbridge. But the nearer it approaches to the epic and the saga, the less likely is that stirring tale to be rigidly confined to fact.
I will not say of Mr Archer, 'his attack must be held to have failed', for that would imperfectly express its utter and absolute collapse. The whole of my original argument as to the narrative of the battle remains not merely unshaken, but, it will be seen, untouched. Mr Archer himself has now pleaded that 'the only' point he 'took up directly' was that of the disputed passage in Wace;[156] and here he could only make even the semblance of a case by deliberately ignoring and suppressing Mr Freeman's own verdict (iii. 763-4), to which, from the very first, I have persistently referred. In his latest, as in his earliest article, he adheres to this deliberate suppression, and falsely represents 'Mr Freeman's interpretation' as 'a palisade or barricade' alone.[157]
Those who may object to plain speaking should rather denounce the tactics that make such speaking necessary. When my adversary claims that his case is proved, if the disputed passage does not describe a shield-wall, he is perfectly aware that Mr Freeman distinctly asserted that it did. To suppress that fact, as Mr Archer does,[158] can only be described as dishonest.
Judging from the desperate tactics to which my opponent resorted, it would seem that my 'attack' on Mr Freeman's work cannot here be impugned by any straightforward means. The impotent wrath aroused by its success will lead, no doubt, to other attempts equally unscrupulous and equally futile. But truth cannot be silenced, facts cannot be obscured. I appeal, sure of my ground, to the verdict of historical scholars, awaiting, with confidence and calm, the inevitable triumph of the truth.
CONCLUSION
'History is philosophy teaching by examples.' In one sense the period of the Conquest was, as Mr Freeman asserted in his preface, 'a period of our history which is full alike of political instruction and of living personal interest'. In one sense, it is an object-lesson never more urgently needed than it is at the present hour. Only that lesson is one which Mr Freeman could never teach, because it is the bitterest commentary on the doctrines he most adored. In the hands of a patriot, in the hands of a writer who placed England before party, the tale might have burned like a beacon-fire, warning us that what happened in the past, might happen now, today. The Battle of Hastings has its moral and its moral is for us. An almost anarchical excess of liberty, the want of a strong centralized system, the absorption in party strife, the belief that politics are statesmanship, and that oratory will save a people—these are the dangers of which it warns us, and to which the majority of Englishmen are subject now as then. But Mr Freeman, like the Bourbons, never learnt, and never forgot. A democrat first, an historian afterwards, History was for him, unhappily, ever 'past politics'. If he worshipped Harold with a blind enthusiasm, it was chiefly because he was a novus homo, 'who reigned purely by the will of the people'. He insisted that the English, on the hill of battle, were beaten through lack of discipline, through lack of obedience to their king; but he could not see that the system in which he gloried, a system which made the people 'a co-ordinate authority' with their king, was the worst of all trainings for the hour of battle; he could not see that, like Poland, England fell, in large measure, from the want of a strong rule, and from excess of liberty. To him the voice of 'a sovereign people' was 'the most spirit-stirring of earthly sounds'; but it availed about as much to check the Norman Conquest as the fetish of an African savage, or the yells of Asiatic hordes. We trace in his history of Sicily the same blindness to fact. Dionysius was for him, as he was for Dante, merely—
Dionisio fero
Che fe' Cicilia aver dolorosi anni.
But, in truth, the same excess of liberty that left England a prey to the Normans had left Sicily, in her day, a prey to Carthage: the same internal jealousies paralysed her strength. And yet he could not forgive Dionysius, the man who gave Sicily what she lacked, the rule of a 'strong man armed', because, in a democrat's eyes, Dionysius was a 'tyrant'. That I am strictly just in my criticism of Mr Freeman's attitude at the Conquest, is, I think, abundantly manifest, when even so ardent a democrat as Mr Grant Allen admits that
a people so helpless, so utterly anarchic, so incapable of united action, deserved to undergo a severe training from the hard task-masters of Romance civilization. The nation remained, but it remained as a conquered race, to be drilled in the stern school of the conquerors.[159]
Such were the bitter fruits of Old-English freedom. And, in the teeth of this awful lesson, Mr Freeman could still look back with longing to 'a free and pure Teutonic England',[160] could still exult in the thought that a democratic age is bringing England ever nearer to her state 'before the Norman set foot upon her shores'.
But the school of which he was a champion has long seen its day. A reactionary movement, as has been pointed out by scholars in America, as in Russia[161] has invaded the study of history, has assailed the supremacy of the Liberal school, and has begun to preach, as the teaching of the past, the dangers of unfettered freedom.
Politics are not statesmanship. Mr Freeman confused the two. There rang from his successor a truer note when, as he traversed the seas that bind the links of the Empire, he penned those words that appeal to the sons of an imperial race, sunk in the strife of parties or the politics of a parish pump, to rise to the level of their high inheritance among the nations of the earth. What was the Empire, what was India—we all remember that historic phrase—to one whose ideal, it would seem, of statesmanship, was that of an orator in Hyde Park? Godwine, the ambitious, the unscrupulous agitator, is always for him 'the great deliverer'. Whether in the Sicily of the 'tyrants', or the England of Edward the Confessor, we are presented, under the guise of history, with a glorification of demagogy.
No man ever deserved a higher or a more lasting place in national gratitude than the first man who, being neither King nor Priest, stands forth in English history as endowed with all the highest attributes of the statesman. In him, in those distant times, we can revere the great minister, the unrivalled parliamentary leader, the man who could sway councils and assemblies at his will, etc., etc.[162]
We know of whom the writer was thinking, when he praised that 'irresistible tongue';[163] he had surely before him a living model, who, if not a statesman, was, no doubt, an 'unrivalled parliamentary leader'. Do we not recognize the portrait?—
The mighty voice, the speaking look and gesture of that old man eloquent, could again sway assemblies of Englishmen at his will.[164]
The voice which had so often swayed assemblies of Englishmen, was heard once more in all the fulness of its eloquence.[165]
But it was not an 'irresistible tongue', nor 'the harangue of a practised orator', of which England stood in need. Forts and soldiers, not tongues, are England's want now as then. But to the late Regius Professor, if there was one thing more hateful than 'castles', more hateful even than hereditary rule, it was a standing army. When the Franco-German war had made us look to our harness, he set himself at once, with superb blindness, to sneer at what he termed 'the panic', to suggest the application of democracy to the army, and to express his characteristic aversion to the thought of 'an officer and a gentleman'.[166] How could such a writer teach the lesson of the Norman Conquest?
'The long, long canker of peace' had done its work—'vivebatur enim tunc pene ubique in Anglia perditis moribus, et pro pacis affluentia deliciarum fervebat luxus.'[167] The land was ripe for the invader, and a saviour of Society was at hand. While our fathers were playing at democracy, watching the strife of rival houses, as men might now watch the contest of rival parties, the terrible Duke of the Normans was girding himself for war. De nobis fabula narratur.
[1] Mr T. A. Archer (Contemporary Review, March 1893, p. 336).
[2] Mr Freeman saw nothing grotesque in Orderic's description of Exeter, as 'in plano sita' (Norm. Conq., iv. 153), though its site 'sets Exeter distinctly among the hill cities' (Freeman's Exeter, p. 6).
[3] That I may not be accused of passing over any defence of Mr Freeman, I give the reference to Mr Archer's letter in Academy of November 4, 1893, arguing, as against Mr Harrison, that the story of a great 'naval engagement' in 1066 may probably be traced 'to the seaside associations of the name Hastings'. Unfortunately for him, Mr Freeman himself had quoted this wild story (iii. 729) and suggested quite a different explanation, namely, that it originated, not in the Battle of Hastings, but in some real 'naval operations'.
[4] Since this passage appeared in print my opponents themselves have written of the Battle of Hastings [sic], and Mr Archer has admitted that 'to speak of Senlac in ordinary conversation, or in ordinary writing, is a piece of pedantry' (Academy ut supra). On my own use of the word before I had examined Mr Freeman's authority, see p. [273].
[5] Norm. Conq., iii. 444.
[6] Ibid., p. 757.
[7] Mr Archer writes: 'Pel is literally "stake", and originally, of course, represented the upright or horizontal stakes which go to make a palisade' (English Historical Review, ix. 6).
[8] Ibid., p. 10. The word which Mr Freeman (and others) rendered 'ash' is rendered 'windows of farm dwellings' by Mr Archer (see below, p. 308).
[9] Mr Archer would have us believe that 'Mr Freeman really had in his mind ... a real wall of real shields and stakes' (English Historical Review, 16), and that the English would 'strap up their shields to the stakes', would combine 'their shields and poles', and so forth (20).
[10] This is Mr Oman's third and (up to now) final explanation (Academy, June 9, 1894).
[11] English Historical Review, ix. 232.
[12] Ibid., ix. 232-3, 237-8, 240.
[13] The difficulty of hauling timber even a short distance over broken and hilly ground 'in an October of those days' (N.C., iii. 446) must not be forgotten.
[14] The italics are Mr Freeman's own.
[15] He even spoke of it as 'the main castle' (Arch. Journ., xl. 359).
[16] Miss Norgate (Angevin Kings) follows him, speaking of their assailants striving 'to assault them as if besieging a fortress'. One is reminded of Mr Freeman's remark as to Hastings, that Harold turned 'the battle as far as possible into the likeness of a siege' (see above).
[17] 'Men ranged so closely together in the thick array of the shield-wall' (iii. 471).
[18] Cont. Rev., March 1893.
[19] English Historical Review, ix. 12.
[20] My detailed reply to Mr Archer's attempt to confuse the 'fosse' and the palisade will be found in Ibid., ix. 213, 214.
[21] He paraphrased 'escuz de fenestres è d'altres fuz' as 'firm barricades of ash and other timber'.
[22] I supply the passage in square brackets (the italics are my own) from the earlier volume to explain Mr Freeman's reference.
[23] Quarterly Review, July 1892, p. 14.
[24] I am loth to introduce into the text the wearisome details of controversy, especially where they are nihil ad rem, and have no bearing on my argument. But, lest I should be charged with ignoring any defence of Mr Freeman, I will briefly explain in this note the attitude adopted by his champions.
In the Contemporary Review of March 1893, Mr T. A. Archer produced a reply to my original article (Quarterly Review, July 1892), or rather, to that part of it which dealt with the Battle of Hastings. Declaring my attack on the palisade to be my 'only definite and palpable charge against Mr Freeman's account' (p. 273) which, it will be found, is not the case—he undertook to 'show Mr Freeman to have been entirely right in the view he took of the whole question' (p. 267). To do this, he deliberately suppressed the fatal passage (iii. 763-4) I have printed above—to which, in my article, I had prominently appealed—in order to represent me as alone in seeing a description of the shield-wall in Wace's lines (p. 267). He then insisted that 'there are six distinct objections to translating this passage as if it referred to a shield-wall' (p. 270).
Instantly reminded by me (Athenæum, March 18, April 8, 1893), that Mr Freeman himself had taken it as a description of the shield-wall, and challenged to account for the fact, again charged (Quarterly Review, July 1893, p. 88), with 'ignoring a fact in the presence of which his elaborate argument collapses like a house of cards', further challenged (Academy, September 16, 1893) to reconcile Mr Freeman's words (iii. 763-4), with his representation of the historian's position, Mr Archer continued to shirk the point, till in the English Historical Review of January 1894, he grudgingly confessed that 'the discovery that a shield-wall (of some sort or other) was implied in this so-called "crucial passage", is due to Mr Freeman' (p. 3), but he and Miss Norgate endeavoured to urge that it could not be as I imagined, the shield-wall that he had always spoken of (pp. 3, 16, 62). Even this feeble evasion, now seems to be dropped since I disposed of it (Ibid., 225-7).
[25] Quarterly Review, July 1892, p. 15.
[26] See below, p. 284.
[27] Quarterly Review, July 1893, p. 84.
[28] Athenæum, March 18, 1893.
[29] English Historical Review, ix. 40.
[30] Ibid., p. 58.
[31] Cont. Rev., 351.
[32] Quarterly Review, July 1893, pp. 93-4.
[33] Ibid., ix. 27, 28.
[34] English Historical Review, 219-25.
[35] Ibid., ix. 607. The italics are Mr Archer's own. His own trusted authority, Wace, posts the English in 'un champ' (ii. 7729, 7769)!
[36] Norman Conquest, iii. 419, 420.
[37] No one, of course, would treat the Tapestry like a modern illustrated journal; but if it be fairly treated, in Mr Freeman's spirit, one's real wonder is that, under such obvious limitations, the designer should have been so successful as he has. Nowhere, perhaps, is the painstaking accuracy of the Bayeux Tapestry better seen than in its miniature representation of the fortress at Dinan. It shows us the motte, or artificial mound, surrounded by its ditch, and even the bank beyond the ditch, together with the wooden bridge springing (as we know it did in such castles) from that bank to the summit of the mound.
As to Mr Archer's attempts to show that Mr Freeman in one or two instances did not value so highly as he did what he deemed the supreme authority for the battle, I need only print Mr Freeman's words, parallel with his own comments, to show how their character is distorted.
| Mr Freeman | Mr Archer |
|---|---|
| The testimony of Florence is by a witness more unexceptionable than all, by the earliest and most trustworthy witness on the Norman side, by the contemporary Tapestry ... in every statement but one.... The Tapestry implies—it can hardly be said directly to affirm—that the consecrator was Stigand (iii. 582). The representation in the Tapestry is singular. It does not show Stigand crowning or anointing Harold (iii. 620). | He rejects the Tapestry's account confirmed of Harold's coronation, following Florence of Worcester's statement—that Harold was crowned by Aldred, Archbishop of York—in avowed opposition to his own reading of the Tapestry, i.e. that Harold was crowned by Stigand. |
| It has been remarked by Mr Planché and others, that at this point the order of time is forsaken; the burial of Eadward is placed before his deathbed and death. On this Dr Bruce says very truly: 'the seeming inconsistency is very easily explained', etc., etc. (iii. 587) ... I do not think that any one who makes the comparison minutely (between the Tapestry and the Life) will attach much importance to the sceptical remarks of Mr Planché (ibid.). | He rejects in toto the Tapestry's version of Edward the Confessor's death, for that 'priceless record' makes Edward buried before he died! Mr Freeman, and perhaps not altogether without reason, follows the saner notion of other authorities, that Edward died before he was buried (English Historical Review, ix. 607). |
One would hardly imagine from Mr Archer's sneers that Mr Freeman had really vindicated the Tapestry from its 'seeming inconsistency', did one not know him, as a writer, to be capable de tout.
[38] Cont. Rev., p. 351.
[39] English Historical Review, ix. 607.
[40] I wish, as I have done throughout, to make it absolutely clear that I am here concerned only with Mr Freeman's rendering of Wace. If we are to go outside that rendering and discuss Wace de novo, it is best to do so in a fresh section. This I hope to do below, when I shall discuss the question of his authority (which has not yet arisen), and shall also propound my own explanation of the now famous disputed passage.
[41] In my first article (Quarterly Review, July 1892, pp. 15-16) I pointed out that the great weight attached to Mr Freeman's statements had of course 'secured universal acceptance' for the palisade, and that it figures 'now in every history'. Mr Archer, in his latest paper, refers to these remarks (English Historical Review, ix. 602) and triumphantly charges me with self-contradiction in having myself once accepted it, like every one else. He refers to an incidental allusion by me in the Dictionary of National Biography so many years ago that I was unaware of its existence. I am particularly glad to be reminded of the fact that I did allude, in early days, to the 'palisade' and to 'Senlac', for it emphasizes the very point of my case, namely, that that mischievous superstition of Mr Freeman's unfailing accuracy must be ruthlessly destroyed lest others should be taught, as I was, to accept his authority as supreme.
My opponent writes:
'Mr Round ... in direct contradiction to the Quarterly reviewer, has found for it [the palisade] an authority in William of Poitiers, and has gone far beyond Mr Freeman himself in giving us the name of the man who first broke it down.'
How has Mr Archer produced the alleged 'contradiction'? He has taken a passage from my notice of Robert de Beaumont, written years before I had made any independent investigation of the Battle of Hastings, and when I thought, like the rest of the world, that I might, here at any rate, safely follow Mr Freeman, when it was only a matter of a passing allusion to the fight. The following parallel passages will prove, beyond the shadow of doubt, that I here merely followed Mr Freeman, accepting his own authority—William of Poitiers—for the incident. Any one in my place would have done the same. But Mr Archer asserts that, on the contrary, I went 'far beyond Mr Freeman himself in giving us the name of the man who first broke it down'. Let us see if this definite statement is true:
| Mr Freeman | My Article |
|---|---|
| The new castle was placed in the keeping of Henry, the younger son of Roger of Beaumont. A great estate in the shire also fell to Henry's elder brother, Robert, Count of Melent, who, at the head of the French auxiliaries, had been the first to break down the English palisade at Senlac—Norman Conquest, iv. [1871] 191-2. See also iii. 486, and Will. Rufus, i. 185, ii. 135, 402. | Of these [sons] Robert fought at Senlac ... [and] was the first to break down the English palisade ... he was rewarded with large grants in Warwickshire, and Warwick Castle was entrusted to his brother Henry—Dict. Nat. Biog., iv. 64. (Mr Freeman's works, of course, are given among the authorities for the article.) |
So much for Mr Archer's assertion that I made an independent statement not found in Mr Freeman's pages. It is obviously impossible to conduct a controversy with an opponent who does not restrict himself to fact.
[42] William the Conqueror (1888), p. 90.
[43] 'Had they done so, they must have been set so close that they could not have used their weapons with any freedom' (Cont. Rev., p. 346).
[44] Short History, p. 79.
[45] Norm. Conq., iii. 763, ut supra.
[46] Ibid., iii. p. 471.
[47] Ibid., i. 271; cf. W.R., ii. 411.
[48] Ibid., iii. 732.
[49] Cont. Rev., 348.
[50] Norman Britain (S.P.C.K.), p. vi.
[51] Ibid., pp. 79, 80.
[52] Dict. Nat. Biography (1890), xxx. 424.
[53] English Historical Review, ix. 2.
[54] Cont. Rev., p. 348.
[55] Ibid., p. 346.
[56] Quarterly Review, July 1893, p. 90.
[57] Old English History, p. 335.
[58] Wace, of course, is the only one worth mentioning of the three last, and even his 'decisive words' prove to be only a personal opinion ('ço me semble') that the axeman's shield must have hampered him (see Cont. Rev., 348, and Norm. Conq., iii. 765).
[59] Q.R., July 1893, p. 91.
[60] English Historical Review, ix. 607.
[61] Oman's Art of War in the Middle Ages, 24 (see Q.R., July 1893, p. 90).
[62] Compare (as Mr Freeman does) Æthelred's description of the English array of the Battle of the Standard: 'lateribus latera conseruntur']
[63] Norm. Conq., iii. 491.
[64] Ibid., p. 471.
[65] Old English History, p. 334.
[66] Norm. Conq., iii. 764; cf. English Historical Review, ix. 18.
[67] 'This is the shield-wall, the famous tactic of the English and Danes alike. We shall hear of it in all the great battles down to the end.' (Freeman's Old English History, p. 112.)
[68] Ibid., p. 155.
[69] Ibid., p. 196.
[70] Norm. Conq., iii. viii.
[71] Ibid., pp. 445-6.
[72] Ibid., p. 472.
[73] Ibid., p. 480.
[74] Norm. Conq., iii. pp. 488, 490.
[75] Ibid., p. 490.
[76] 'The battle was lost through the error of those light-armed troops who, in disobedience to the King's orders, broke their line to pursue' (Ibid., 505).
[77] 'The day had now turned decidedly in favour of the invaders' (Ibid., 491). I am obliged to quote these two passages, because my opponents have not shrunk from impugning (Cont. Rev., 353; English Historical Review, ix. 70) the accuracy of the words in the text (which are from Q.R., July 1892, p. 17).
[78] Q.R., July 1893, 101.
[79] Norm. Conq., iii. 472.
[80] To have placed some of them as an advanced post on the 'small detached hill' in front would have been to leave them en l'air, exposed to certain destruction from an attack which they could not check. For Mr Freeman held that, even if occupied by an outpost, it was only by the 'light-armed'. (See Q.R., July 1893, pp. 99, 100.)
[81] On what ground are the Bretons so described? Guy, quoted by Mr Freeman (iii. 459) writes of them here: 'Gensque Britannorum quorum decus exstat in armis, Tellus ni fugiat est fuga nulla quibus'.
[82] I have replied in English Historical Review (ix. 255) to Miss Norgate's characteristic quibble (Ibid., p. 75) that these quotations apply to the Scottish army alone—for the principle applies alike to 'armati' and 'armatos', to 'milites' and to 'militibus'.
[83] Down to this point the present section is all reprinted from my original article (Q.R., July 1892), as not calling for any alteration or correction.
[84] 'The general mass of the less well-armed troops of the shire in the rear.' (England under the Angevin Kings, i. 290.)
[85] English Historical Review, ix. 611.
[86] When the Scotch, he writes, 'amentatis missilibus et lanceis longissimis super aciem equitum nostrorum loricatam percutiunt, quasi muro ferreo offendentes, impenetrabiles [compare the 'impenetrabiles' ranks of the English at Hastings, supra, p. 276] invenerunt.... Equitantes enim nulla ratione diu persistere potuerunt contra milites loricatos pede persistentes et immobiliter coacervatos' (pp. 264-5). Miss Norgate follows him, writing: 'The wild Celts of Galloway dashed headlong upon the English front, only to find their spears and javelins glance off from the helmets and shields of the knights as from an iron wall.'
[87] 'Tota namque gens Normannorum et Anglorum in una acie circum Standard conglobata, persistebant immobiles' (Hen. Hunt). 'Australes, quoniam pauci erant, in unum cuneum sapientissime glomerantur' (Æth. Riv.).
[88] It is no less interesting than curious that the Bayeux Tapestry enables us to see how the archers were combined with the mailed knights at the Battle of the Standard. It shows us (on its principle of giving a type) an English archer of whom Mr Freeman has well observed: 'He is a small man without armour crouching under the shield of a tall Housecarl, like Teukros under that of Aias' (iii. 472). So Æthelred writes that the mailed warriors 'sagittarios ita sibi inseruerunt ut, militaribus armis protecti, tanto acrius quanto securius vel in hostes irruerent, vel exciperent irruentes'.
[89] 'Proceres qui maturioris ætatis fuerunt ... circa signum regium constituuntur, quibusdam altius ceteris in ipsa machina collatis' (Æth. Riv.). 'Circum Standard in pectore belli condensantur' (Ric. Hex.).
[90] 'Reliqua autem multitudo undique conglomerata eos circumvallabat' (Ibid.).
[91] Norm. Conq., i. 383.
[92] Ibid., iii. 472.
[93] Old English History, p. 331.
[94] English Historical Review, ix. 75.
[95] Old English History, p. 333.
[96] Miss Norgate, unable to deny the glaring 'self-contradiction' involved in Mr Freeman's words, dismisses it as a 'matter of secondary importance' (English Historical Review, ix. 74).
[97] English Historical Review, ix. 74.
[98] Q.R., July 1892, p. 19.
[99] Q.R., July 1893, pp. 102-3; cf. Q.R., July 1892, p. 18; English Historical Review, ix. 254.
[100] It might, for all we know, have formed a crescent or semi-circle, its wings resting strongly on the rear-slopes of the hill; or even a 'wedge', as, indeed, Mr Freeman twice described it (i. 271, iii. 471).
[101] English Historical Review, ix. 74.
[102] Cont. Rev., p. 353.
[103] Q.R., July 1892, p. 19.
[104] Since this passage appeared (as it stands) in my original article (Q.R., July 1892, p. 19), I have noted a curious confirmation in Æthelred's words where he speaks of the archers at the Battle of the Standard as 'militaribus armis protecti [ut] tanto acrius quanto securius vel in hostes irruerent, vel exciperent irruentes'. For, as I wrote (p. 20), 'it would naturally be they who, like cavalry in modern times, would harass and follow up a retreating foe'.
[105] Old English History, p. 334.
[106] For Baudri's poem see Q.R., July 1893, pp. 73-5. As to Baudri's authority, I need only repeat what I wrote in the English Historical Review (ix. 217): 'Mr Archer endeavours, of course, to pooh-pooh it. Now I call special attention to the fact that the test I apply to Baudri is that which Mr Freeman applied to the Tapestry, the obvious test of internal evidence. But Mr Archer's ways are not as those of other historians: instead of examining, as I did, Baudri's account in detail he dismisses it on the ground that the writer's "description of the world" at that date could not be accurate (Ibid., 29). We are not dealing with his "description of the world"; we are dealing with his lines on the battle of Hastings.'
[107] Norm. Conq., iii. 467, 477.
[108] English Historical Review, ix. 42-3, 603.
[109] Though I have already done so in English Historical Review, ix. 250.
[110] English Historical Review, ix. 42.
[111] Mr Freeman rendered the 'sagittis armatos et balistis' of William by 'archers, slingers, and crossbowmen'. 'Balistæ' can hardly mean slings and crossbows, and I think, on consideration, it is best referred to the latter; but the question is not of much importance.
[112] So, too, in Arch. Journ., xl. 359: 'You may call up the march of archers and horsemen across the low ground between the hills.'
[113] Norm. Conq., iii. 462. I regret that I must call attention to the fact that I gave (English Historical Review, ix. 250) this precise reference for my statement that, according to Mr Freeman, the infantry were all archers, explaining that in another passage (p. 467) William of Poitiers had led him to take a somewhat different view. Mr Archer, however, has printed (English Historical Review, ix. 603) the other passage (p. 467) in triumph by the side of my statement. He further denies that Mr Freeman held, even on p. 462, that the infantry were all archers. Anyone can test the value of Mr Archer's denial for himself by referring to Norm. Conq., iii. 462, where he will find that Mr Freeman, describing the Norman host, mentions no infantry but archers.
[114] As he had merely copied from the Tapestry on p. 462, so he copied William of Poitiers on p. 467.
[115] The distinction between archers and crossbowmen is of little or no consequence, the missile being common to both.
[116] My opponents complain that in the former passage Mr Freeman assigns this task to 'the heavier foot' only; but my point is that no palisade is here mentioned, and no attack on it by any infantry, heavy or light, and no weapons assigned to that infantry of any use for the purpose.
[117] This is an excellent instance of what I said as to Mr Freeman's 'imaginary' references to the now famous palisade. I have challenged my opponents to disprove my statement that none of Mr Freeman's own authorities says anything here of a palisade. And, of course, they cannot do so.
Here is another instance in point. We read on pp. 486-7 that Robert of Beaumont was specially distinguished in the work of breaking down the 'barricade' (see also supra, p. 273). But when we turn to William of Poitiers, the authority cited, we find no mention of a 'barricade', but read only of him 'irruens ac sternens magnâ cum audaciâ'. As the writer had just described how the Duke 'stravit adversam gentem', we see that Robert, in his charge, laid low, not a barricade, but 'adversam gentem'.
This brings me to an extraordinary case of mediaeval plagiarism. The author of the Ely history has applied this description of Robert's exploits to the Conqueror himself at Ely (Liber Eliensis, pp. 244-5). The passages 'Exardentes Normanni—deleverunt ea', 'Egit enim quod—magna cum audacia', 'Scriptor Thebaidos vel Æneidos', et seq., are all 'lifted' bodily from William's narrative of the Battle of Hastings and applied to the storming of the Isle of Ely!
[118] Norm. Conq., iii. 467.
[119] 'The Norman infantry had now done its best, but that best had been in vain' (Ibid., 479).
[120] Norm. Conq., iii. 481.
[121] Ibid., 767-8.
'Un fosse ont d'une part fait
Qui parmi la champaigne vait
* * * *
En la champaigne out un fosse:
Normanz l'aueient adosse
En beliuant l'orent passé
Ne l'aueint mie esgarde.'
I had followed Taylor in my rendering of this passage; but Miss Norgate (English Historical Review, ix. 46) would prefer to say that the Normans did not heed, than that they did not notice the fosse. 'The passage,' as she says, 'is somewhat obscure.'
[123] Miss Norgate has rightly pointed out (ix. 47) that Henry places the disaster during the great feigned flight.
[124] Cont. Rev., p. 348.
[125] Compare the death of Robert Marmion, at Coventry, under Stephen, when he fell into one of the ditches he had dug to entrap the enemy's horse. The passage quoted by Andresen in his Wace (ii. 713) from Michel's notes to Benoit is very precise: 'Fecerant autem Angli foveam quandam caute et ingeniose, quam ipsi ex obliquo curantes maximam multitudinem Normannorum in ea præcipitaverant. Et plures etiam ex eis insequentes et tracti ab aliis in eadem perierunt.'
[126] See below, p. 292.
[127] Early Oxford, pp. 191, 192. And see my preface.
[128] See above, p. 278, for Mr Freeman's view.
[129] 'Angli vero, illos putantes vere fugere, cœperunt post eos currere volentes eos si possent interficere' (Brevis Relatio). 'Ausa sunt, ut superius, aliquot millia quasi volante cursu, quos fugere putabant urgere' (Will. Pict.).
[130] Though admitting, in a footnote, that the 'Brevis Relatio' was opposed to this assumption.
[131] Supra, p. 278.
[132] Q.R., July 1892, p. 20.
[133] Miss Norgate has indignantly retorted (English Historical Review, ix. 50) that Mr Freeman 'only' omitted the words from 'sicque' onwards. But it is precisely on these words that my statement is based. Mr Freeman, moreover, did not even quote the rest à propos of the feigned flight, where we should look for it.
[134] So does Will. Gem., as quoted by Mr Freeman (iii. 133): 'de suis miserunt si quos forte hostium a regio cœtu abstraherent, quos illi in latibulis degentes incautos exciperent.' See also my Addenda.
[135] Cont. Rev., p. 354.
[136] See above, p. 251.
[137] See above, p. 259.
[138] Norm. Conq., iii. 763-4.
[139] Social England, i. 299. 'Mr Oman, like Mr J. H. Round, knows nothing of the famous "palisade", but only of the "shield-wall" of the English' (Speaker, December 2, 1893).
[140] Norman Britain, p. 79.
[141] Ibid., p. 80.
[142] Social England, p. 300.
[143] Cont. Rev., p. 353.
[144] Ibid., p. 335.
[145] English Historical Review, ix. 607.
[146] Ibid., ix. 219-25.
[147] Ibid., 224, 257.
[148] Norm. Conq., ii. 469; and supra, p. 356.
[149] Cont. Rev., 352.
[150] Ibid., 348.
[151] Cont. Rev., 335-6.
[152] 'The Reviewer ... tells us that ... Mr Freeman ... is wrong, completely wrong, in his whole conception of the battle.... His attack must be held to have failed' (Cont. Rev., pp. 335, 353).
[153] Norm. Conq., iii. 763.
[154] Cont. Rev., p. 349. Cf. Mr Archer's articles passim.
[155] English Historical Review, ix. 22.
[156] English Historical Review, ix. 607.
[157] Ibid., ix. 606. Supra, p. 269.
[158] Ibid., ix. 606, 607. My readers are invited to refer to this article and to that in the Cont. Rev. (March 1893), and test my statement for themselves.
[159] Anglo-Saxon Britain, p. 172.
[160] Norman Conquest, iii. 454.
[161] e.g. Vinogradoff and Dr Andrews.
[162] Norm. Conq., ii. 352.
[163] Ibid., 327.
[164] Ibid., 326.
[165] Ibid., 332.
[166] 'We shall get rid of the talk about "an officer and a gentleman".' (Macmillan's, xxiv. 10).
[167] Vita Wlstani.